


A Kinder World

by thenightwindow



Series: Remember Not to Forget [1]
Category: 1917 (Movie 2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Fix-It of Sorts, Kinda, Libraries, M/M, Reincarnation, Soft Boys, Will centric, gratuitous descriptions of dreams, i love special collections so here you go, soft angst, soft boys in love, technically canon compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-12
Updated: 2020-02-27
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:20:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 31,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22642489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thenightwindow/pseuds/thenightwindow
Summary: Every day, Will tried to hold it all in a little better than the day before. Some days, he even succeeded.But every night was a minefield, laying in the dark, desperate for sleep, desperate for peaceful darkness in the space behind his eyes.He didn’t dream of the blood, of the mud, of the bullets every night, but the fear was always there. The fear was almost worse than the dreams by now, the clinging anxiety of knowing it could arrive at any time, invading his dreams of the little girls dancing through the halls, of the sounds of singing and chatter and laughter.Of Blake.-Will has lived his life with the ghosts of the past invading his dreams and bleeding into his connections in the waking world, but his neat, routine existence is thrown into upheaval when Tom Blake wanders into his life.
Relationships: Tom Blake/William Schofield
Series: Remember Not to Forget [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1673752
Comments: 168
Kudos: 368





	1. Chapter 1

For as long as Will could remember, he’d had the same dreams. He knew he should have called them nightmares, the smell of mud and fire and iron heavy, the ringing in his ears, the bodies, he knew all of that added up to nightmares, even as a child. But they felt too real, too visceral for that.

It reminded him of watching movies at the cinema, the screen so big that it filled his eyes and pulled him in so he forgot himself for a while. Only, instead of forgetting, he felt almost like he was remembering something—or at least trying to.

Some nights, it was the names of the two little girls who chased each other around the table, his eyes blank and filled with visions from some far, lonely place. Other nights, it was the lights trailing in huge arches over his head as he ran, trying to remember the way. But most nights? Most nights were spent desperately trying to piece together the same face: soft, flashes of blue eyes, dark hair, laughter ringing out.

Will knew that everything would finally make sense if he could just _remember_.

Laughter, blue eyes, then cries of pain, his hands warm and sticky, heart filled with panic, something deeper than that.

Why couldn’t he just _remember?_

It had been an abnormally hot August the year he turned seventeen, and Will had done his best to waste every damn second of it. He knew his parents were a bit worried about how much time he spent holed up in his room, nose in his books, searching, always searching, but it was too hot for even them to care about whatever he was getting up to. Will much preferred it this way, instead of being chased out to pretend like the other neighbourhood boys interested him at all—or, honestly, that they gave two shits about him in return.

Will had his books and his histories, and that was fine.

But nothing good lasted forever, he thought ruefully as his shoulder bumped against the bus window.

“Your granddad could use some company,” his mother had said, pretending rather horribly to sound casual, like she was only making a suggestion. “It’ll be cooler out in the country; some fresh air would do you some good.”

Slumping in his seat, Will scowled at the buildings passing by, wishing that there was ever a simple answer like his mother thought there was. When Will had told them of his dreams as a child, she had assumed that the therapy would make him normal again. When Will hid away from the world, she made it out as if he simply needed to smile more for the people his own age. It was bollocks, but Will was always a little too tired to care anymore. Years of carrying so many ghosts on his shoulders did that, he guessed.

But, as much as he hated leaving his safe corner of the world, he didn’t hate his granddad.

He’d always liked the smell of the cherry trees that bloomed in the garden out back, liked the little trinkets around the house from his life, liked the history etched into his granddad’s face. If he closed his eyes, Will could almost believe that life was simpler there, sitting in the parlour watching the light chase the shadows across the framed photos on the walls.

It was honestly just dealing with the rest of the world to get there that bothered Will. He hated buses, trains, planes, all of it. The crush of bodies around him, the press of so many faceless people, it made his throat close up with some unnamed feeling that tasted like so many dreams he’d had. Dreams that left him panting and kicking off his blankets, ready to run, ready to fight.

Will was lucky today, though, the bus mostly empty around him. There were a few people seated in front of him, yet his eyes hovered over the young boy, maybe thirteen, sat a few rows ahead of him. His hair was dark, but Will knew instinctively that it was the wrong colour.

As much as he hated crowds, he could never quite stop himself from scanning the faces around him. Searching, always searching.

His granddad lived just outside the city, but it was fast encroaching, the borders pushing further and further out as people tried to carve out the land. Still, it felt like the country in his mind, so maybe that was good enough. Will’s footsteps were slow, sluggish under the humid sun. He held his book with only his fingertips, hoping not to crease the pages with his sweat.

When he reached the house, his granddad was sat out back, watching the trees and flowers waving in what little breeze there was. “I was wondering when you’d arrive,” he said as Will set down his book on the little table next to his abandoned tea cup.

“Did mum ring?” Will asked, tucking his hands into his pockets and watching the now leafy green cherry trees. There was always something to remember.

“No, I just had a feeling,” his granddad replied. He stood slowly, popping his back into place before shuffling into the house, not bothering to beckon Will to follow. The curtains were drawn over the open windows, making the house slightly cooler and dark. There was a silence that Will felt here that was hard to explain, like something inside him that was constantly circling like a hare in a trap could rest here. This house had been in his family for so long that it felt like maybe a part of him lived here, too.

Will followed his granddad to the kitchen where he was pulling a bowl of cherries from the refrigerator, and setting them carefully next to a box on the table. There was something about it, something about the shape or the smell or _something_ that made Will freeze in the doorway. Eyes wide, heart thumping loudly in his ears.

“What is that?” he said, his voice almost a whisper.

“Something that I’ve been meaning to show you.”

His granddad pulled out a chair for Will and sat down next to it before gently lifting the top of the box. Will approached slowly, knowing that his fear was irrational, but still unable to fight it back.

“This was my father’s,” his granddad explained, pulling out a small velveteen box. “From the war,” he added, a bit uselessly in Will’s opinion. Where else did old men get their medals from than ‘the war?’ “My father was a bit of stoic man, a bit sombre, so I heard very little of what he went through. But he gave all of this to me, trusted me with it, and I’d like to trust it to you now.”

Will now stood at his granddad’s shoulder, finally able to see the few contents inside the box. Besides the velveteen case, there were a few trinkets—old ID tags, a faded blue box in pretty stamped metal, a stack of letters tied with twine, an old uniform folded neatly, and precious little else.

“There isn’t much here,” Will commented faintly as he reached out to trail his fingertips along the dusty uniform.

His granddad chuckled as he pulled out the blue box. “No, but he said that there was very little worth remembering of those times.” Gesturing to the chair again, silently asking Will to sit, he continued, “I wasn’t around before the war, as you know, but my eldest sister did tell me once that he was a different person before he was sent to France. That he would laugh and play with them, that nothing got him down. By the time I was a child, I knew a very different person. Very kind, very gentle, but also like he was…” He pressed a hand over his mouth as he thought, eyes focused on some middle point Will couldn’t see.

“Like he was missing something,” Will finished for him, a feeling of unnatural calm settling over him.

“Yes, yes, just like that. I used to assume that was something that happened to everyone who survived. The guilt. They didn’t know how to handle that kind of pain back then, so they didn’t. But my father, I believe that he might have simply lost too much.” As he spoke, his granddad opened the blue tin, and pulled out a small stack of photos. “Sometimes losing one person too many will do that.”

On the top of the stack was a portrait of two girls. Will could feel his breath growing shaky.

He’d seen them, giggling as they ran through his dreams, heedless of his pain.

“My sisters,” his granddad explained, tapping their faces one by one with obvious care. “My mother,” he continued as he flipped the photo to reveal a woman who looked so familiar that Will had to bite his lip hard to keep from calling out. “Ah, here’s what I was looking for.”

Will couldn’t keep in the tiny gasp, the ache in his throat choking his breath at the photo before him. It was a portrait, a grainy photograph of a man wearing a matching uniform to the one inside the box. He stared out of the photo, eyes set ahead, looking for all the world to be Will. Same nose, same set to his jaw, same look in his eyes. Serious, but always watching, curious, yet anxious.

It was _himself._

“My father,” his granddad said, pointing to the man. Laughing, careless as the little girls in his dreams, his granddad joked, “Strong genes from that one, clearly. I always knew you’d grow up to look like him, although it’s a shame you never got to meet the man. He passed just before you were born. Lived a good, long life, he did.”

“It’s not possible,” Will mumbled, taking the photo from his granddad with shaking fingers. He squinted down at it, hoping that it would shift, that a veil would fall from his eyes to reveal some difference between them. His great-grandfather looked just the same as before.

“I’ve felt for a long time that he lives on in you somehow. It’s the eyes.”

“How—?” Will began to say, glancing up from the photo towards the rest of the stack in his granddad’s hands.

Colour flashed before Will’s eyes, the photograph no longer sepia toned and flat. He could see the exact colour of the mud under the men’s feet, could picture the mottled colour of the grass after being trampled by so many men and horses. But it was the flash of blue that made him stutter out, “Granddad, who’s that man?”

Under his finger was a man, the glow of youth still clinging to his face. Soft cheeks, dark hair, bit of a laugh in the quirk of his lips. He was shorter than his great-grandfather standing beside and just a little behind him.

“It’s funny that you noticed him first,” his granddad said. He gently pulled a thin chain from the box as he spoke, “He’s the man I’m named after. A dear friend of my father’s, died far too soon. I wish I could tell you more, but that’s all he would tell me.” Hanging from the chain was a small golden ring, a signet engraved into the round, flat top.

“What’s his name?” Will asked as he took the chain into his hands, gently, so gently. Some distant part of him knew what his granddad would say, could feel the name burning on his tongue with so many unspoken words.

“Blake. His name was Thomas Blake.”

As the years passed, Will could feel that name stitching itself tighter and tighter into his veins, a constant presence in the life he tried to carve out in the present. It wormed its way through his brain, even as he did his best to put it out of his mind.

The tube was abnormally crowded, and Will could feel the beginning of a migraine forming behind his eyes. He breathed very deliberately from his nose, forcing himself to focus on looking out the smudged windows at the walls flying by. No scanning the crowds, no watching, no searching.

His old therapist liked to tell him that letting go of his hyperfixations, rejecting them outright, would help him feel more connected with the world, but honestly, he just felt tired. Very, extremely tired.

“Dreams can’t hurt you unless you let them,” every therapist he’s ever had told him, time and again, like that would make it real for Will. He wished that life was that simple, that easy to split into neat little categories the way they did with the books and the photographs and the ephemera at the university library. Because, ever since seeing his great-grandfather’s possessions years ago, since he packed them up and carried them home through the heat, his dreams only seemed to hurt him more.

It was like knowing the faces made the images, the sensations all the more intense in his dreams, all the more real when he opened his eyes. Yet, everything was still so vague. Around what little he knew were flashes of colour and fleeting smells and the hint of texture under his fingers, but maybe that made it worse, too. How could he fight what he didn’t know?

All he wanted was to find the face in the crowd, but he chose to stare straight ahead as he walked through the throng of fellow commuters, navigating his way back aboveground. He’d learned to put up with it all by now, learned how to blink away the flashes of pain, to press down the need to watch for dark hair, soft cheeks, wry smile. He’d learned how to live with one foot in some other place, some past that could be completely made up from the delusional fantasies his parents were convinced he’d outgrown.

Every day, Will tried to hold it all in a little better than the day before. Some days, he even succeeded.

But every night was a minefield, laying in the dark, desperate for sleep, desperate for peaceful darkness in the space behind his eyes.

He didn’t dream of the blood, of the mud, of the bullets every night, but the fear was always there. The fear was almost worse than the dreams by now, the clinging anxiety of knowing it could arrive at any time, invading his dreams of the little girls dancing through the halls, of the sounds of singing and chatter and laughter.

Of Blake.

Those nights were the worst, dissolving from innocuous, rather pleasant dreams of cherry trees and soft grass and the vague sounds of his voice to blood. Blood under his nails as he pressed his hand over Blake’s, his fingers weak and cold under Will’s.

The entire world faded with Blake.

He had woken to that two mornings before, and it clung to him—the hopelessness, the desperation, the fear. It was a stain across his soul at this point. Will tried to keep living his life, but it never stopped Blake from dying in his arms.

The campus was filled with that particular type of energy that September always brought, the freshness that came despite the autumn. But it was lost on Will, still trapped in the fog that dreams of Blake slipping away always left hovering over him. He cut through a mildly circuitous route to avoid the worst of the roving bands of students, the masses of people milling about the university. Tucked in amongst the old trees and university buildings was the library, a sprawling, ancient building with countless new wings branching out in all directions.

Will slipped into the back of a crowd of students that filed into the building, but he quickly cut away from them. He turned from the general collections, the study areas, and crowded computers and aimed towards the quietest corner of the building: special collections.

At this time of day and year, the reading rooms looked abandoned, as if no one was even here at all. But behind a set of double doors, the beehive of the collection spread out across countless storage and repair rooms, a massive maze of cubicles tucked into the main hall. The entire wing smelled like dust and paper, and Will felt himself relax a little from the press of his commute. He beelined for the break room like usual.

“So, I take it that mum’s home remedy didn’t work for you?” Purnima asked as Will shoved his bag into his little work locker. She sat at the staff table, peeling an orange like she had nowhere to be, feet propped up on a chair. Her voice had been sarcastic, the way she gestured to his face trying for a laugh, but her eyes were serious.

“No, still just as shitty at sleeping as I was before,” Will shrugged, laying his jacket over his bag and swinging the metal door closed. “My flat smells like an old lady’s now, so I guess I have that.”

“Oh, god, I even told her to ease up on the lavender oil,” she groaned.

Will had always been a solitary person, the child happiest to be left on the side-lines while the other children played, but Purnima had decided to chuck that out the window. They had arrived for their first days of work at the same time, newly minted librarians fresh from graduation just days before, and she decided that fact was more than enough for them to be instant friends. He didn’t mind it, more amused at the image they cut.

He was tall and thin, rather morose and always a little too serious, with a sense of humour that was lost on most people. She was chatty, a little too loud, passionate about almost everything—negative or positive, she had an opinion on everything. Purnima should have been grating, honestly, but there was something endlessly charming about her, her need to connect with everything around her. Sometimes he wondered if the only reason why she hung around him was simply to have some other outsider to roll her eyes with.

It didn’t really matter, though, because she was an actually good friend, and Will wasn’t going to question that too much.

“Don’t worry about it, give it a few days, and mum’ll send some new yoga cure,” Purnima laughed, tossing her orange rinds into the bin. “Imagine how handsome you’ll look if you actually slept once every month or so.” She patted Will’s cheek almost mockingly when he rolled his eyes.

“I sleep every night. Just not consistently.”

“Sure,” she sniggered. They filed down the hallway towards the storage rooms, the scent of citrus following them. “So, you all set for that history lecture this afternoon? There’s nothing like droning at some bored undergrads about primary sources.”

“God, don’t remind me. Why the hell do they keep sending me to these things? You’re the one everyone likes,” Will sighed as he pulled open the door to the equipment room.

Purnima shrugged as she ducked inside to grab the box they had packed the day before with all of the items they would need. “Hey, maybe the curator keeps hoping that you’ll actually get some sleep, charm everyone through the door. Besides, you’re really the subject matter expert on this one, so I don’t know why you’re surprised.”

“Yes, but no one gives a damn about physical preservation, especially not undergrads.”

“I was meaning the World War parts, but you do make a fair point,” Purnima said, handing Will the box heedless of the stillness he carefully painted across his expression. Will had been trying, really doing his best to live in the present, but it was like the world kept dragging him into the past.

His master’s thesis was what got him this position, he knew that, a sweeping study on the current state of preservation techniques used for ephemera of the early 20th century—an emphasis on the Great War happening so naturally when he couldn’t stop himself from getting lost in the artefacts he kept finding. The photos, the silent film reels, the personal effects, all spread wide across the county in all states of upkeep and repair. And he told himself that going east to look for more artefacts to use wasn’t motivated by anything other than scholarly curiosity.

But, when he found a single photo of Thomas Blake in a local historian’s attic somewhere in Essex, he couldn’t lie to himself anymore. So, he published his thesis and did his best to bury the thing.

Bury the past.

It seemed, though, that maybe the past wasn’t done with him yet.

They were scheduled to speak in one of the larger auditoriums today, more like a proper presentation. That often made it easier for Will, the distance and the lighting making all of the faces in the audience blur together, disappear as he talked. Then, he could sit back and let Purnima handle the rest, her natural charm and modern slant within the field making her the usual target of most of the questions they received.

Today proved no different. Will talked the crowded undergrad history course through the content of the university’s special collections, through their reading room policies, through their preservation efforts—things he cared about immensely, but knew from the various stifled yawns was about as dry and boring for the students as their regular history lecture. It was always a relief to hand off the presentation to Purnima. For the most part, he simply tuned her speech out, following the cadence of her voice without registering any of her words. He could probably give her presentation by memory at this point, anyways.

He perked up slightly when she glanced back, finally paying attention as she said, “Alright, well, we’ve bored you lot long enough. Does anyone have any questions about special collections?”

The questions were usual: why their food and beverage policies were so strict, how to set up one-on-one time with a librarian, where to find their digital repositories, all rather rote. But it was an equally innocuous question, one about how to get involved with volunteering, that caught at his attention.

The voice.

Will had no idea who had asked, unsure of which face in the crowd to look towards. He could feel his heart racing even as he forced his face and voice to remain calm as he chimed in on Purnima’s response.

But the world seemed so distant. Even just the hint of his dreams threw him back, pain and anguish clawing up his throat, desperate for some kind of release. He barely registered the rest of the questions, distracted as he was taking long and slow breaths, forcing his eyes to remain still. There was no face in the crowd to find, he told himself, there was no one there. Just ghosts.

By the time that the professor released the class, Will almost felt like himself again, more controlled at least. He’d done a good enough job covering it that Purnima didn’t even ask, a feat that Will decided was a victory for the day.

“We actually got some good questions today, yeah?” Purnima commented as she tucked their few visual aids back into their box.

“Well, these were history students today,” Will replied, voice faint but level. “They might actually need to use our collection at some point in their studies, so it’s not exactly surprising that they would pay slightly more attention.”

Purnima laughed easily, “God, if that was only ‘slightly,’ I can’t even imagine what it would feel like to have people actually give a shit.” She turned slightly as Will held up her jacket, slipping her arms into the sleeves. In all of their meaningless chatter, Will hadn’t even noticed him approach until he stepped into their lines of sight.

Round cheeks, average height, average build, blue eyes, dark hair. Boyish, handsome. For all the world, he would have been just another face, but, for Will, time had crashed to a full stop.

Blake.

“Hey, I was the one asking about volunteering? I wanted to pass on my name,” he said, like he wasn’t burning down Will’s entire existence, like he’d never called out for Schofield to follow him, like Will never saw the blood on their hands, entwined as his face turned ashen. No, he just held out a slip of paper, torn and folded, to Will, smiling over the images engraved into the hollow places behind Will’s eyes.

“Thank you,” Purnima responded for them as Will slowly took the paper from his hand, careful not to touch him. He could see her shooting him a confused glance, but he couldn’t.

“Okay, cool. I’ll see you ‘round, then? Cheers,” he said, and then he was gone.

“Will?” Purnima asked after a long beat of silence, touching his arm.

“I going to be sick,” Will muttered. He stumbled off the stage, aiming for the wc in the hallway beyond. Closing the door behind him, he leaned back against it as the first heaving sob left him. This couldn’t be real, his mind was constructing his dreams over his real life, that _had_ to be it. It couldn’t—he couldn’t.

Distantly, Will realized that he still had the paper he had given him, crumpled in his hand. With shaking fingers, Will smoothed out the wrinkles in the paper before carefully opening it.

Printed in a slightly untidy scrawl was his email and student ID, neat and very real.

Tom Blake.

“Oh, god,” Will mumbled, pressing his hands over his eyes. The face in the crowd, the one he’d convinced himself wasn’t real, had been dead for over a century now, he’d found Will.

Will had bowed out of work early, desperate for the comfort of home but dreading it in equal measure. The crowds seemed to part for him, his face so pale that he might as well be sick at this point. His commute home, already a fairly short one, was made even shorter by the lessened crowds at midday.

He barely stumbled out of his shoes as he barrelled through the door. His flat was tiny, a long and narrow shape that played tricks with the light. Rushing past the bookcases and curios, he staggered for his bedroom, flung open the wardrobe door, and pulled down the box that he’d carried home from his granddad’s so long ago. Underneath the faded uniform, he pulled out the folders he’d promised himself that he would get rid of after his thesis had been approved.

One labelled “William G. Schofield,” the other “Thomas Blake.”

Ignoring the former, he sunk to ground to flip through what precious little he had found on Blake’s life. The photo his granddad had kept, a matching record to one in the Schofield file listing their regiment, a photocopy of a report permitting a Lt. Joseph Blake home leave following his brother’s death. But he flipped to the photo in the back, the one he’d found in Essex.

Blake hadn’t even been shipped out yet in the photo, him among the reinforcements being sent to France following the Somme. He stood to the far right of three men, all framed well and in focus. Will traced his fingertips over the curve of Blake’s eyebrow, trying to keep the shards of himself together.

It was like the man he’d seen today had stepped out of this photo in full colour, glowing with youthful confidence. It was _him_.

This had to be a dream. It had to be, the Blake he’d met today hadn’t been scared, hadn’t frozen with confusion. He couldn’t possibly have any links to Blake like Will had to Schofield, not when Blake died in 1917 in Schofield’s arms and his elder brother died of Spanish Influenza only two years later. No, it was just Will dreaming up another fantasy.

But he couldn’t decide whether this was the worst or the best of them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to my massively tropey, cliche love letter to my soft boys. I just want them to have nice things, dang it


	2. Chapter 2

Dutifully, Will sent Tom Blake the standard volunteer email the next day, all of the information presented drily and simply. Nothing personal, nothing to indicate that Will had no idea how to handle this situation. He was torn between wanting to see Tom Blake around every corner and wanting to never even think of the man again.

But they were always hard up for volunteers, so he put both sides out of his head as best he could.

Like with everything else, he did a passible job, shutting off the parts of his mind, of his heart that were hurting. He pushed ahead, desperate not to look back to see what was hiding there. Waiting for him.

He rode the tube to work, staring out the windows. He worked, throwing himself into all of the stupid projects that no one liked to do—tedious things like cleaning manuscripts or transcription work spent squinting at cramped, faded handwriting. He went home, curling up on his couch watching mindless shows just to have some noise. He tried to sleep, praying for emptiness instead of dreams. He didn’t think about it.

Will knew he wasn’t doing well, but he was trying, damn it.

“Mum sent some tea this time. It’s got echinacea, says that it works wonders according to some blogger she follows. Take that as you will,” Purnima said as she slid the paper bag across the break room table two weeks After Blake. His brain had already begun to translate things into those neat terms they loved so much in the archival world—A.B. After Blake.

“Fantastic, can’t wait to contract horrible gastrointestinal issues from this,” he smiled ruefully as he glanced inside the bag. It didn’t smell badly, per se, but it certainly didn’t smell like a bed of roses either.

“Shut up, you tosser,” she chuckled.

“I love being around you young folk,” Judith, a middle manager in the collections acquisitions department, sighed happily as she spread her lunch in front of her and sat down next to Purnima. “Really livens up the place.”

Purnima pressed her lips together, holding in laughter as she raised her eyebrows at Will.

When someone pushed open the door, Will shifted slightly, making more room at the table for whoever had decided to take their lunch break. But, instead, the outreach librarian poked her head in, smiling broadly when she saw the three of them around the table. “Ah, here’s some people worth knowing,” she said, ushering in the person she was with.

Will felt his shoulders stiffen as his eyes connected with Blake’s—no, Tom’s.

He’d worked his entire life to separate out Schofield from himself, one Will Schofield from the other, and it wasn’t fair to this strange facsimile of Thomas Blake not to try to do the same.

 _This is just some bloke named Tom, that’s all_ , he chanted mentally as the outreach librarian introduced them all in turn.

“Will, you’ve been on transcriptions lately, correct?” the librarian asked, breaking his mental loop and pulling him back to reality. But it was fine, he was completely normal. He could handle this, somehow. Maybe.

“Yes,” he answered, his voice level and calm. Handled.

“Fantastic. Once we’re done with the grand tour of the place, I’ll hand Tom off to you, then. Let you show him the ropes.”

Beside her, Tom smiled broadly, friendly, at Will, and it took everything to just keep moving, not to stare openly at the smile that no photo he’d found had captured, but that he received flashes of in the better of his dreams. Will nodded, trying his best to seem nonchalant, like this was routine.

It kind of was. He’d helped volunteers before, usually when Purnima was busy with something, but he’d done it and done a fair job.

But this was far from routine. He’d be alone. With Tom.

Oh.

“Well, alright, back to your lunches!” the librarian said brightly. Tom followed her with a wave, a parting that Will couldn’t even register for all the ringing in his ears. This was an extremely, horribly bad idea.

“Oh, Will, you’re in it now,” Judith giggled, sending Purnima into hysterics. “Delightful, delightful.”

Will blinked rapidly, trying to get his head back in order, trying to claw out a sense of normalcy between the sounds of their laughter. Not that his sense of normalcy was all that secure, but he had to try. He shook his head and tried his best to ignore their little comments. It wasn’t like they could ever understand, anyway.

But his hands were shaking just a little as he walked into one of the back workrooms, the silence suffocating as he waited for Tom to wander in. It was still so surreal to know that he was real, he was here, he would be arriving so soon.

Patting his chest, Will wished that the little tobacco tin Schofield carried was with him, that he was brave enough to carry Blake’s ring. Something, anything to comfort him.

The door squeaked a little, startling him from his thoughts. “Uh, Mr. Schofield?” Tom asked as he stepped into the room, uncertain of where Will would be waiting for him. When he caught sight of Will sitting in the back, leaning over a book cradle, his face relaxed, all uncertainty gone. “Hey,” he said as he strode across the room. But all that was ringing through Will's mind was _Schofield_ on Tom's tongue, his dreams overlaying reality.

“Will,” he replied instead of greeting him, feeling rather acutely that he was very much lost.

“Huh?” Tom cocked his head to the side as he stopped on the other side of Will’s work table. All that separated them was the smooth counter, but Will could practically feel the weight of him, the force of his presence.

“Will. You can call me that. If you want. We’re not horribly formal here,” he said. Everything about his voice and his demeanour and he was sure his face, as well, screamed awkward idiot, but every word he spoke felt a little lighter than the last. Every moment that passed felt a tiny bit more bearable than before. Stress inoculation, he assumed.

“Nice, alright.” Tom’s laugh was the same, just the same as the fleeting sounds of his most pleasant dreams. The ones that rarely turned into blood and dust, to ringing bullets overhead, to flares in the night sky.

It was comforting in the strangest of ways.

Transcription was indeed rather tedious, but it wasn’t exactly difficult, and Tom took to it without complaint. It was easier this way, quiet and professional. If they kept this up, Will might be able to be in the same room as Tom without feeling like he was slowly sinking into the mud of his dreams.

They were squinting at a piece of marginalia in the journal of some late 18th century poet, projected large over a white patch of wall, when Tom slouched back in his chair and asked, “Is this mostly what you do?”

“Hm?” Will hummed as he flipped through an Old English dictionary, trying to find a solid match for a word they couldn’t agree on. “You mean transcriptions?” When Tom nodded, Will shrugged in return. “Not really. My specialty is physical preservation, maintaining everything. But we all need to know a little bit of everything, hence the transcription.”

“What’s involved with that? Is that, like, gluing shit back together?”

Will found himself laughing, a strange feeling, really, laughing without even registering the joke first. Tom blinked kind of slow, looking something between dazed and delighted. “In some cases, yes, I do glue shit back together. But for the most part, I’m a glorified cleaner. Things arrive in all kinds of states, and we have to preserve them however we can. It can be a bit mindless, but I guess I like that about it.”

“Meditative,” Tom offered.

“Yes, meditative,” Will mumbled, looking back to his dictionary. Something in his chest was settling now, the quiet a bit less heavy against it.

The longer they worked through the journal, the more things Will could pinpoint to separate Blake from Tom—the way Tom’s hair was longer, falling over his forehead a bit, the way his forehead was a little smoother, less tension riding there. Will remembered precious little concrete details from his dreams, so he focused on that, focused on the fact that this was real and solid and straightforward. Instead of dissolving into the dreams of blood, everything felt like the best of his dreams. The soft sounds of Tom singing under his breath, the flashes of a bright, smirking smile, blue eyes.

By the time Will had to pack the journal away, his dread had been replaced, wiped out with the desperate need for Tom to just _exist_. To sit next to him while he worked, talking just to pass the time. To be near and laughing and alive.

He had so many more questions than answers, but Will decided not to give a damn right now.

“When can you show me the glue and all that?” Tom asked as he followed Will from the workroom and down the hall. He could have left at any time, most volunteers made their own hours, but he simply wandered around behind Will as he prepared to head home for the evening.

Suppressing a chuckle behind his hand, Will navigated through the maze of desks to his own to check his emails. Leaning over his keyboard, he scrolled through, his eyes barely registering the words displayed before him, instead watching Tom from the corners of his eyes. “And why should I trust you with glue?”

“Hey! I’m responsible! And good with my hands, thank you very much,” he pouted back.

Will lifted his eyebrows in mock doubt, enjoying the way Tom flustered himself, fluffing up like a chickadee.

“The fact that you’re still here after hours of transcription work has probably earned you the right,” Purnima commented as she leaned over the divider between their two desks. She threw a wink to Tom. “Especially with Will. He can be a right bore when he’s on the job.”

“I’m sorry, who asked you?” Will asked, not bothering to look up at her.

“It wasn’t bad,” Tom said, the edge of defensiveness colouring his voice. It almost tipped towards shy as he continued, “I liked it just fine.”

“Ooh, ringing endorsement,” Purnima cooed, reaching over to poke Will’s shoulder.

“Again, I ask, ‘who asked you?’” Will sighed. He sent Purnima a dry look as he closed out of his email and set the computer to rest mode. “And now I’m leaving, hope to talk to you never.”

“Talk to you tomorrow, then!” she called after them. “Have a nice night, Tom!”

“She’s a bit of an odd duck,” Tom commented, following along like Will’s shadow. Not that he minded much. “I like her, seems fun.”

“She is. Most of the time.”

The main library was quiet, the number of students dwindling the closer it got to evening. Tom walked alongside Will so casually, so normally that he was almost startled when Tom turned to head the opposite direction at the entrance.

“Oh, shit, wait,” Tom mumbled. He pulled a slip of paper from his bag, holding it out to Will. An image formed in the back of Will’s mind: a letter, sealed and folded, tucked into Schofield’s tobacco tin. A letter that should have been in Blake’s breast pocket. “Could you sign my volunteer form? I have to track my hours,” Tom said over the image.

“Right,” Will replied faintly.

When he returned the form, signed with his quick signature, Tom tucked it into his bag, eyes focused downwards as he asked, “So, next week. You’ll show me the good stuff, yeah?”

Will felt his lips part, a wave of emotion rolling over him. “Sure,” he said shakily.

“Great,” Tom said, a strange sense of relief on his face as he grinned up at him. “I’ll see you then.”

“Yes.”

Will barely even registered his commute home, his mind still swimming through his day. It wasn’t until he was already in his own kitchen, waiting for his kettle to boil when he realized: he hadn’t even thought of scanning the crowds as he went home. No searching. He gripped the edge of the bench, feeling like he was tipping precariously into something that he couldn’t explain, but couldn’t stop. Leaping headlong into dark waters.

He hadn’t needed to search, because he had finally found a place for his eyes to rest.

After a solid week of trying desperately not to risk the danger of setting his hopes too high, Will still couldn’t get over the surrealness of bending over a worktable with Tom at his elbow as they carefully and methodically repaired the spines on a series of books.

“I _told_ you that you could trust me with glue,” Tom said smugly as he placed a rebound book into a book press, not five minutes before spilling book glue down his shirt sleeve.

Will found himself laughing about it for days afterwards.

Life had a strange way of simply continuing, and Will found himself walking into work on a Thursday morning with the song Tom had been singing the day previous still stuck in his head. The realization that this was his normal now hit him like a train.

Tom came in reliably on Wednesday afternoons, very quickly earning the love of every older woman on staff (which was to say _most_ of the staff) with his charming smile and endless anecdotes and perpetual willingness to cart around heavy things without complaint. He’d be practically running around the place for a few hours, only to inevitably wind up wandering the backrooms until he found Will.

He seemed to have some kind of radar for him, ducking his head into whichever nook Will had found during the day and starting up on some story he hadn’t finished the week before. It was so natural, like this was just how life always was, the flash of his smile in the corner of Will’s eye, the glimpse of whatever doodle he’d drawn while Will was working, the shape of his voice in Will's ear.

Will would never admit it to anyone, least of all himself, but he waited impatiently all week for those moments with Tom spent joking over whatever Will was working on that day.

His dreams were still there, hanging like a fog over his mind. A fog that only Tom seemed able to cut through at all. He still woke up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, clawing for breath, but it was easier to push through the worst nights and the tired days that followed knowing that, by Wednesday, there’d be something worth pushing through for.

“Have you been sleeping better?” Purnima asked as Will tossed his bag into his metal locker.

“Hm? I don’t know, I don’t think so?” he replied, taking the cup of tea she passed to him with a grateful smile. She gazed curiously at his face, as if there were answers hidden under his skin. “Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know. You just look…” She gestured vaguely around his face. “Like you’re in colour instead of black and white, maybe.”

The image of Schofield, serious faced and sepia flashed behind Will’s eyes.

“Oh,” was all he could reply. He sipped his tea for something to do, but Purnima seemed to sense his aversion and changed the topic as casually as possible. But her comparison stuck to him like a burr, digging in deeper the harder he tried to remove it. Nothing had happened lately—nothing except Tom.

The thought that Tom, the very realization of the past, was bringing Will forcefully into the present seemed too ironic to accept.

But maybe there was something to it, he thought as he flipped listlessly through the channels on Saturday afternoon. Maybe he’d been so used to living in the past that he’d let himself sink into the muck and dust until he stopped trying to follow the thread of his life here and now. The problem with admitting to that was to admit to _needing_ Tom’s presence in some way, more than just _wanting_ it.

That was one step too many right now.

Will had been careful to temper and disguise that particular line of thought by the next Wednesday. The last thing he wanted was to burden Tom with any of his emotional baggage.

It was safer that way.

When Tom wandered in, grinning when he caught sight of Will elbow deep in a stack of albumen prints, Will wondered if Tom was the type of person who even had it in him to be burdened by anything at all.

“So, we have to do these debates, right? Trying to make us think about historical shit critically, all that,” Tom said as he neatened up the stacks that Will was forming on his workbench. “And this one bloke, Jordan, was debating about the Russian Revolution or some shit. He tries to pull the old Napoleon line—you know the one, ‘an army marches on its stomach.’ But the absolute idiot looks this other guy right in the eyes and says, ‘don’t you remember what Napoleon said? An army crawls on its belly!’”

“Oh my god,’ Will wheezed, leaning back from the table as he laughed. “How—there’s only two things to get right!”

“I know! And he went and buggered both!” Tom laughed. “And I swear to god, all I could think was of a whole line of soldiers, all ready to fight, but when the charge is called, they just flop down in the dirt and just sort of—” Tom leaned forward and wiggled a bit, approximating a strange crawl forward.

It had been so long since Will laughed like this that he sometimes forgot what to do with his hands, reaching out for anything to hold on to. In this case, Tom’s shoulders.

There was a natural feeling there, like his shoulders were made to be sturdy enough to support Will. But he couldn’t fight the moment of expecting to feel rough wool, the thick webbing of a kit bag. Luckily, Tom didn’t seem to notice Will’s laughter tapering off too quickly.

“Hey, you think Purnima’s still around?” Tom asked as Will closed the workroom behind them at the end of his shift.

“Probably. Do you have something to ask her?”

Something settled oddly in Will’s chest when Tom nodded. “Yeah, I was hoping to catch her before now, but she was with Joanne when I came in, and I didn’t fancy inviting her, too.”

“Inviting her to what?” Will asked faintly just as they rounded into the breakroom.

“Evening, boys,” Purnima greeted them as she slipped on her jacket. “There something worth being invited to?”

“I mean, I hope so,” Tom said, angling himself to be partially facing them both, despite being at opposite sides of the room. “So, my mates are taking me out for my birthday this weekend. Figured I’d ask you both along.”

“Ooh, sign me up!” Purnima said as she sidled up to Tom, her mobile held out to him. “It’s been literal ages since I had a proper night out! Add your number, and I promise I’ll drag Will along.”

“Cool,” Tom replied, eyes trained on Purnima’s mobile intently enough that he missed the massive wink she sent to Will over his bent head.

Handing over Purnima’s mobile, Tom glanced over at Will, looking bashful for a moment as he asked, “So, do you want my number, too? It’s not a problem if you’re busy or don’t feel like coming or—”

“No, I’ll come,” Will interrupted. It took him a minute to dig his mobile out of the bottom of his bag, rather neglected for the most part during the day, but he waved Tom goodbye with a brand new contact saved to his contact list, feeling a little like he’d just signed up for something that he was wholly unprepared for.

“Oh, my god, I literally cannot wait to see you surrounded by rowdy undergrads,” Purnima laughed as they made their way to the tube station.

“Jesus, I didn’t even think of that,” Will groaned.

“I love how whipped you are for that kid. Just fully and truly whipped.” She shook her head with clear amusement, turning towards her own flat and leaving Will at the station with a wave.

Will sighed at her retreating back and hoped like hell that he wasn’t walking into a complete mess.

The table practically exploded with cheers when Purnima arrived back with a tray of shots. Will was jostled slightly, sandwiched between two boys whose names he couldn’t remember. Glancing over at Tom, his face alight with laughter as Purnima kissed him square between the eyes, Will felt his stomach twist oddly, wishing that he could make his shoulders relax, make his smile seem natural and easy like everyone else’s. Will had never been great with big crowds, but he tried to keep it all together, for Tom’s sake.

Purnima leaned over the wooden table to pass Will his shot, the clear liquid spilling over the rim and onto his fingers. “Drink up, Will!” she called. “We’ve got to get you pissed enough to dance!”

“Not a fucking chance!” Will shouted back before throwing back the tequila simply to give himself something to do.

His night may not have been shaping up to anything amazing, but Purnima was in her element. She basked in the attention of Tom’s friends, the boys and girls alike drooling over her broad smiles and the way her gold jewellery and makeup made her almost glitter in the low lighting. Tom seemed to think it was hilarious, so Will decided not to comment.

He still hated tequila, though.

“Fine, then me and girls are going to have a fantastic time without you,” Purnima laughed, taking the hands of the two girls sitting to her right and pulling them out to dance floor. “Any boys that aren’t chickenshit are welcome to join us!”

Will bit back a smile as the girls and the majority of the boys, fish eyed and brave on liquor, followed her siren call.

“You never can tell how hard some people go,” Tom chuckled as he slid into a vacant seat next to Will. “Had a feeling with her, but damn, she doesn’t play around.” He tossed back his own tequila shot, scrunching his nose with distaste as he swallowed. Pushing the glass away from him on the table, he complained, “Jesus, how cheap is this shit?”

“It might be a little late in the night to care about that,” Will replied. He had to lean over a little to shout over the music, and he caught a hint of something mingling with the scent that Will hadn’t even realized he recognized as Tom’s.

“Fair. Very fair,” he laughed back as he leaned into Will’s shoulder.

Weird, little giggles burst from Will’s chest, the buzz hitting him all at once as Tom leaned back just a little, their shoulders still barely touching. His face felt so warm, but it wasn’t enough to suffocate him yet, especially now that the press of unknown people had moved away. Now there was only Tom giggling with him.

“I take it you’re more of pub type. More conversation, better booze, better atmosphere, all that,” Tom said as he leaned back in.

Will kind of wanted to bury his nose in Tom’s hair, trying to find the source of his scent.

“Sure. But it’s not like I go out much, anyways,” he said instead. He felt rather proud of his self-control in the face of how many drinks he’d had and the power of whatever the hell it was that Tom had doused himself in.

“What do you do, then? Drink alone?”

“No, I mostly just sit around and brood. It’s all very poetic,” Will shot back, looking with mock seriousness into the middle distance.

Tom leaned hard into Will’s shoulder as he laughed, his hand warm and heavy against Will’s back. It wasn’t like they never brushed up against each other occasionally at the library, but this was so deliberate in a way that Will wasn’t accustomed to. Like Tom wanted to be laughing over Will being a misanthropic hermit instead of drinking and dancing like an idiot with his friends.

It had been such a long time since anyone picked Will over everyone else that he had no idea where to put the thought.

“Fuck it,” Tom declared as he sat back up. Will’s shoulder felt infinitely colder without him pressing his weight into it. “Let’s go brood at a pub somewhere, it’s way too loud in here.” He pulled himself up and disappeared into the crowd of dancers. Will watched him go, uncertain of whether Tom would actually come back for him or whether he’d get caught up in his crowd of friends.

So, he settled back in his seat, waiting. Tom was twenty now, an age that Blake had never been able to reach. Will tipped his shot glass back and forth, thinking of all the things that Blake had missed out on. A life taken far too soon versus a life only just begun.

“You ready?” Tom asked, emerging from the crowd at Will’s side.

“Yes.”

The cool night air felt like heaven after the heat of the bar, like Will could finally breathe again, like he was surfacing from underwater. In his pocket, he could feel his mobile vibrating like crazy. Glancing at the screen, he saw a series of frenzied messages from Purnima filled the screen, gibberish mixed with exclamation points. Messages that he very promptly ignored.

“God, it’s good to hear myself think again,” Tom laughed, feet a little unsteady but confident as they navigated down the street.

Despite the fact that they had left to search for a pub, Will was a bit relieved when Tom led them around the sidewalks away from the bar, slow and casual. Nowhere to be, nowhere they needed to go, really. The night was rather grey, heavy clouds hanging in the sky overhead as they ambled.

“Smells like rain,” Tom commented as they passed under a streetlight, the golden light catching on his eyelashes and the curling ends of his hair for a moment. Where Purnima had glittered under the lights of the bar, Tom seemed to spark for an instant, a fire glowing.

“How can you tell?” Will asked. He gazed up at the sky suspiciously.

“Just told you, Will, I can smell it,” Tom giggled, throwing his arm over Will’s shoulder, stumbling them together. “Smells a bit metallic-like. Kind of still and sweet. Apparently, what you’re smelling is the ozone, but don’t quote me on that.”

Will breathed in deeply, but all he could pick up was the musky, woodsy scent on the edge of Tom’s warmth. “Sure, sure. Why do I feel like you’re going to recite some kind of pagan spell to bless my house and protect me from fairies or some bollocks?” he said, smirking down at Tom as they half-stumbled down the street.

When Tom laughed, throwing back his head a bit, his laughter vibrated through Will, making him feel kind of electric.

“Can’t bless your house if I don’t even know where it is,” Tom said through his laughter.

“Not a problem,” Will shot back, pulling them to the curb to flag down a taxi. It wasn’t until they had laughed their way through the ride and stood huddled in front of Will’s front door, hiding from the rain that was just beginning to fall while Will dug his keys from his jacket, that he realized how mental this all was. They were both fairly drunk at this point—still coherent, but laughing over literally everything—and Will was going to be stuck in his small, quiet flat with Tom and his stupid cologne.

But it was fine, he told himself as he finally got his key to turn in the ancient lock. This was just Tom. Just Tom.

“Alright, feel free to begin the pagan ritual at your leisure,” Will said when they both managed to make it inside. He hung up his jacket and helped Tom out of his just for something to do, feeling oddly like he was letting Tom into someplace personal. It had been ages since someone else had even been in here, so maybe he kind of was.

Tom leaned up against the doorjamb as he pulled off his shoes, glancing around like everything was far more fascinating than it was. “Wow, I thought you worked in a library, not that you lived in one,” he joked with a little gesture to the bookshelves lining the walls.

“Piss off,” Will muttered, his smile clear in his tone.

“Seriously, though, did you inherit all this from some old man? Hell, did you _steal_ it all from old men?” Tom continued, undeterred as he walked around the perimeter of the sitting room, gazing at all of the little knickknacks Will had collected, his fingers trailing along the spines of the books.

"Maybe _I’m_ secretly the old man,” Will replied as he wandered into the kitchen to put a kettle on. The truth in his words felt heavy somehow. “Tea?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Tom called back.

Will tapped his fingers against the bench as he waited for the water to boil, the rain picking up outside. He tried not to let his mind wander to the feeling of wet mud soaking into his boots, the stench of stagnant water pooled in craters in the wide expanses where nothing could grow. Rain seemed so innocuous, but he knew how dangerous it could be.

Or, well, Schofield knew.

From the other room, he could hear Tom chuckling over something, and Will could feel his shoulders relaxing.

“I think all my mates are going to abandon me for Purnima,” Tom said as he wandered into Will’s tiny, rather neglected kitchen, tucking his mobile into his pocket. “And I might abandon my flatmates to live in your museum, this is great.”

“It’s not much,” Will shrugged, but he could feel the flush of pleasure at Tom’s genuine compliment hidden under his jokes.

Tom shook his head a little, grinning sidelong at Will. “Sure, but it’s more than enough.”

Will could feel that his brain was slowing slightly, the last of the alcohol sinking in, circling round and round with Tom sinking into the space, filling it up with life. Maybe it was the way the streetlights were angled on this particular night, but the place felt a little lighter now. Like maybe the light was curving around Tom and shining out on everything he touched.

Eating beans on toast in front of the telly on the sitting room floor, Will remembered thinking so clearly, like a bolt of sense in the midst of the blur of liquor, simple and distinct.

He wanted Tom to stay.

And when he closed his eyes, curled on the couch, listening to the sound of rain on the windows, to the sounds of their breathing mingling across the sitting room from each other, he wondered if Tom would still be there when he woke.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Much more Tom in this chapter, so hopefully a bit more lightness, as well  
> I also want to add that while I adore special collections, I've never worked in one, so please forgive me for any mistakes I've made in representing it here.


	3. Chapter 3

Will awoke to singing, quiet and distant, as if he was hearing it from the other side of a dream. Maybe he was, it wasn’t like there was ever anyone with him when he fell asleep. It was safer that way.

But the singing continued even as he felt himself waking, the lights and the sounds of life outside breaking through. Will could feel the stiffness in his neck already behind the dull press of a headache. When he finally managed to peel open his eyes, the light streamed into his sitting room, cheerful despite the rain last night. He groaned gently as he sat up from his curled position on the couch.

For a moment, he held himself very still, letting his equilibrium find itself again. Nothing about the room seemed any different from usual at first, but there was a distinct nest of cushions and a half-folded blanket along the side of the couch. Parallel to where he had slept.

“Morning!” Tom called from the kitchen.

At the sound of his voice, Will let out a silent breath. He hadn’t dreamed, hadn’t woken kicking and whimpering at the visions behind his eyes. He was fine.

“Holy shit,” Will mumbled when he finally dragged himself into the kitchen, the sight of Tom still in last night’s clothes, cooking eggs and sausages at his cooker like it was nothing, sort of short circuiting his brain. “Fuck your flatmates, please come cook me meals forever,” he said before his mind could catch his mouth.

Tom’s nose scrunched slightly as he laughed, making him seem younger somehow. “You need to keep more food in the place if you’re offering. What are you even surviving on, toast and wishes?” he said, pointing his spatula at Will accusingly despite his laughter.

“Yeah, sounds about right,” Will shrugged.

Dropping into one of the chairs at his dining table, he watched Tom move around the kitchen like maybe he was supposed to be here, cooking up what little food Will bothered to keep in his cupboards. Will had spent his entire life creating lines between the parts of his life, trying to contain the past as best he could, but all of that seemed to fall away with Tom. Everything that Will had assumed to be true about himself simply rearranged, reaching out to wrap itself around Tom.

Will knew he should be worried, but, right now with the promise of the first solid breakfast he’d had in months, he decided not to care.

The transition seemed so natural, happening so slowly and organically that Tom seemed to be climbing up the walls of Will’s flat like a vine in the summer sun. Where once the narrow space was imprinted with nothing but his own fingerprints, simply a place to wait out the oncoming onslaught of pain, the remnants of some other life, now it had begun to take a new shape.

Tom had forgotten his jacket at Will’s place after he left that first time, and, even though Will had thought to grab it before leaving for work on Wednesday, he simply _didn’t._ He just left it there, hanging off the door of the hall closet where Tom had left it Saturday night as they drunkenly fell inside out of the rain. It had been nice, coming home to some sign of life outside of himself, a tiny piece of Tom that he wasn’t afraid to have out. Not like Blake’s rings or photos, ghosts that Will desperately wanted to put at peace.

But there was a nice consequence to Will’s negligence: Tom simply followed him home Wednesday afternoon.

He lay his schoolbooks across the table in the sitting room that afternoon while Will went through his usual routine—tea, tidying, time wasting. There was no hesitation to him staying, it was almost an understood thing that Tom would just make himself comfortable around the worn paths that Will wandered. His comfort seemed to seep into everything he touched. Will couldn’t help but hope that it would begin to seep into him if Tom just kept hanging around.

Tom forgot his jacket again.

Within the span of a few weeks, Tom began to follow Will home every Wednesday evening. No reasons offered, no excuses needed, just routine.

“Okay, I was going to mind my business, but that’s boring,” Purnima sighed on a Thursday morning as they tucked their bags into their lockers in the breakroom. “And Tom’s friends won’t stop blowing up my mobile, so—"

“Why would Tom’s friends be messaging you?” Will asked as he swung his locker closed.

“Because I’m their mother hen now. They are my chickees, and I have taken them under my wings.” She mimed gathering chicks into her arms, saying, “They need me. I mean, who else is going to teach them not to be sloppy drunks on a Tuesday night? You have to be a _classy_ drunk on Tuesdays. But! That’s beside the point,” she said, waving away her own tangent. “They’re just a little curious about you since Tom has sort of moved in with you.”

Will could feel his brow lowering in confusion when he glanced over at her as they walked down the hallway towards the offices. “Tom has not ‘moved in’ with me. He’s at my place maybe one night a week, that’s nothing.”

“Oh, really? Because, just yesterday, he sat around waiting for you to come back from that conference call for lord knows how long just to immediately follow you out the building.” She frowned when he gave her no reaction. “And it might be one night a week, but it’s the _entire_ evening. He legitimately asked me the other day if I knew if you like asparagus. _Asparagus_. Because I guess he cooks for you now? And I’m not even going to start with all the intel I have from his mates.”

“Intel?”

Purnima sighed dreamily. “The things I could tell you, it’s astounding, really. The drawing alone! But I was pledged to silence, so you’ll get no more out of me.”

“Great, keep your secrets. I still don’t know what there even is to discuss. We’re just friends,” Will grumbled, wishing she would just drop the entire conversation. Not that he wasn’t _curious_ or anything, but it was all a little too much.

There were obviously a million things to discuss, but there was no clear place to begin, no place that was safe enough to protect Will’s careful acceptance of what they had. Of what Tom left behind, like the fact that he had somehow managed to leave multiple pairs of shoes in his entryway, despite never leaving barefoot, or how Will specifically bought raspberry jam because he knew Tom liked that better than the apricot marmalade that he had on his own toast, or how the entire flat seemed to deflate and fade to sepia whenever Tom left.

Or how Will always seemed to have kinder, gentler dreams on Wednesday nights.

“This is just a bit different for you, that’s all. I mean, I've never even been by your place! We’re all just a little curious about, you know, the trajectory of this _thing_.” Purnima raised her eyebrows as she said “thing,” a euphemism so vague that Will kind of wanted to crawl under his desk and just sleep all of this off.

“Well, to begin with your first point, I live in a one bed flat, so you can cross that one off the list. He’d have nowhere to sleep,” Will muttered, typing a little harder than he needed to on his keyboard.

“How is _that_ the problem here?” she asked slowly as she leaned over the divider between their cubicles.

“Second, he cooks for himself, and I just get whatever he doesn’t eat,” Will continued on, ignoring her. This was a rather blatant lie, if only because while Tom did indeed cook whatever he wanted, he always made up a plate for Will first. It was nice, a type of comfort that he'd long since assumed he'd never receive, but Will tried not to dwell on it.

Purnima laughed gently, resting her chin on her hand. “Mmm, I don’t think you get how this works.”

“How what works?”

“Affection,” she said, voice tipping upwards like it was so obvious. Will glanced up sharply. “People show they care about each other in some pretty strange ways, but, chief among them, is taking care of that person. Like, come on, you go home, and your mum rags on you for not eating, then fills you full of food. Affection,” she repeated with a broad gesture like she was presenting the word to him for the first time.

“Great, so now Tom’s my mum?” Will sighed, letting his head tip back to glare at the ceiling.

Purnima tutted, “Now you’re just being obtuse on purpose. Look, we’re just wanting to poke our noses in a bit. Make sure you’re both doing well, feeling good, staying connected with people outside of the two of you. Normal stuff.”

Will continued to stare up, relieved when Purnima let the subject drop. He knew she had a point, at least with Tom. There were connections in his life, friends and family and classmates, he was checked into the world, into the present in a way that Will had never quite been able to achieve, living partially buried in the century old mud of France.

Despite everything Blake had been put through, Tom remained clean, untouched by trauma and suffering. He deserved to have that, to not be weighed down by Will.

But it wasn’t like Will could just ask him to go, not when he’d settled so perfectly into the blank, open spaces Will left, not when it was Tom’s choice to be there. He’d pressed warm and comforting into Will’s work, his flat, his life, and Will didn’t want him to go. Couldn’t ever ask that of him.

He could feel his need to keep Tom close growing inside him, flowering into something wild and choking in his chest. Wednesdays had never felt like enough, but he knew that very soon having that day alone was going to drive him up the wall, waiting for the next week.

It was getting bad enough that the next Saturday, Will actually pulled out his file on Blake, desperate just to see some pale reflection of Tom’s face outside of his dreams.

For so long, this was all he had, he thought as he gazed down at the only picture of Schofield and Blake together, the one Schofield had carried with him in the little tobacco tin after the war. He held Blake’s ring up the light. The gold shone dully, a pale imitation of Tom’s eyelashes in the streetlights.

He wondered if he would ever feel like he had enough of Tom to satisfy the ache in his chest.

In the other room, he heard his mobile chirp out. He set Blake’s file on top of his box of research and hid it back away in his wardrobe, wishing that their ghosts would just stay in there, too. But Tom was messaging him about some stupid thing or other his flatmates were doing, and Will felt like maybe he’d be able to hold off the ghosts for at least a little while.

Despite the fact that Will had tried his best to put Purnima’s words out of his mind, they clung to him, tangling themselves up in his head more and more with every interaction with Tom. Red flags, strange little markers of _something_ began to catch at his attention.

Suddenly, the joking messages felt like a secret code that Will didn’t have the cipher to. Maybe the particular smile Tom would give him as he left for the night was a code in itself. A code hidden in the way Tom would crowd over his notebook whenever his pencil strokes morphed from the short, jagged sounds of writing to the slow, smooth sounds of drawing. Tom was never all that keen on showing Will what he was drawing, his eyes turning evasive and shy whenever Will would show any interest at all. But there were codes in the things he did share, too, hidden words laced under the sound of his voice.

He could feel it building towards something on a particularly blustery day in December. A mostly sleepless night after waking to the choking gasp of dust in his lungs, the blindness as the world fell around him, left him exhausted before he even stepped foot in the library, and a three-hour budget meeting that spanned his entire morning did nothing to remedy the situation. If it wasn’t Wednesday, Will might have just laid down and quit outright.

Tom had been compensating for it, Will could feel it in the exaggerated enthusiasm that he laced into everything he did. It was so natural, the way he reacted to Will’s moods. He could almost feel the world warming around him with each laugh Tom pulled from his lips.

Somehow, he just knew.

“Baby, now, take me into your _fucking_ arms. Kiss me under the light of the _fucking_ stars. Oh, darling, place your hand on my _fucking_ heart,” Tom sang easily from the kitchen, his voice tipping through the swears exaggeratedly. Will knew that he was putting on a bit of a show for him, even hidden away as he was on the sitting room couch. With each line, Will’s laughter grew more delighted, some of the pressure of the day slipping away.

But then his mobile rang.

Mum.

“Shit,” Will mumbled, lurching to his feet and into the kitchen as he swiped to accept the call. He pointed silently at his mobile as he ducked into the room, a silent warning to Tom as their eyes connected. Although his song ended abruptly, Tom couldn’t stifle his laughter completely.

“Will?” his mother asked in his ear. “William, are you there?”

“Yes,” he responded as he moved back out into the sitting room, feeling oddly self-conscious. That usually came with any conversation with his mother, but Tom being so close, Tom being able to _hear_ made everything feel so much stranger.

“Oh, hello, dear. I thought I heard someone else for a moment,” she said softly. Questioning.

“Um. Yes,” he began haltingly. “You did. A friend is visiting.”

“Oh my, how lovely.” Her genuine pleasure cut through Will, the guilt over keeping Tom to himself, for himself, pressing oddly against his throat. “I won’t keep you long, then.” Yet, she paused, clearly meaning to say something, but seeming hesitant. The weight of whatever it was hung between them.

“Alright,” Will said slowly.

“You’ve stopped seeing your psychiatrist.”

Will swallowed, his grip on his mobile growing painfully tight. “That’s correct,” he stated, trying for even and level.

“Your father and I just wanted to be sure you’re thinking…logically about this.”

“Mum, I—" Will pressed the heel of his hand against his eyes, trying to string together a coherent response. It wasn’t like he could tell her the truth, that he was simply tired of the same advice about managing his anxiety when it wasn’t even _his_. It belonged to someone who had been dead since before he was even born, some phantom who couldn't just let him live. “I’m fine. Please don’t worry about it.”

“How can I ever stop worrying about you? I just—” she cut herself off, stifling the hurt in her voice. When she spoke again, it was calm, measured. “I just want what’s best for you.”

Will breathed long and slow, desperate to just hang up on her, to shut her out, but hating himself for wanting it so badly. “Really, I’m fine. I’m sorry, I have to go,” he managed to say almost pleasantly.

The line was so quiet for a moment, he wondered if she had simply hung up on him. “Alright. I hope you and your friend have a nice evening. But call me if you need anything. Please,” she said, a tiny break in her voice that lingered even after Will lowered his mobile, after the screen had gone black.

But softly Tom began to hum again, drowning out the hurt. Tom had never held Will, had never wrapped his arms around him for more than a moment, but it felt like he was in that moment. His voice cradled Will.

“So,” Tom announced as he barged into the repair room. “Turns out my dumb-arse mates have been bothering Purnima about you.”

Will didn’t bother glancing up from the endpapers he was carefully gluing back into place. “I’m honestly a bit surprised that I knew about that before you,” he commented mildly as he smoothed out the paper, working out any air bubbles with a bonefolder.

“Well, I’m not. Purnima actually tells you shit that matters occasionally instead of taking the piss all the time,” Tom sighed as he flopped in a chair opposite him.

“Fair, but I usually don’t bother listening to Purnima half the time, so.”

“Jesus, even _you’re_ taking the piss right now,” Tom grumbled, reaching out to dig through Will’s book repair kit, finally settling on a tamping brush to flip around while he talked. “Doesn’t it bother you, though?”

“Not really. They’re obviously curious about why we’re friends in the first place, which is an extremely valid question that even I don’t know the answer to,” Will said as he stood to place the book under a book press. He took more time that he needed to, letting his emotions settle off his face before turning back to Tom.

“You don’t know why we’re friends?” He’d never sounded so small before, frowning down at the brush in his hand.

He’d cut into Tom without even meaning to, torn through something that Tom probably thought was understood. “Of course I know why I’m friends with you,” Will replied gently. “I meant that they’re just as confused as I am about why you’re friends with me.”

Tom said nothing at first, staring hard at his lap, jaw jutting forward in thought. “That’s a bloody stupid thing to wonder about,” he mumbled.

Will bit his lip and wished that he could snatch his words from the air, that he was half as good at making people smile as Tom. “You’re probably right,” he said after a long moment, leaning over the work table to pat Tom’s shoulder. But, somewhere along the way, Will’s hand went rogue to rest gently against Tom’s cheek, his fingers patting at his jawline. Warm and soft under his palm. It was probably the most awkward thing Will could have done in that moment.

And yet, Tom pressed his lips together in that particular way when he was trying to hold back a smile. A tiny victory.

Although a little more subdued than normal, Tom’s laughter did eventually return, him launching into a spirited retelling of his weekend, elaborating on the messages he’d sent Will the entire time. And when Tom didn’t head off the opposite direction from Will as they left the library, he could feel his chest settling with relief.

The tube was more crowded with people than usual, forcing them to stand closely as they passed through the stations. When the train rolled to a stop, the motion sent Will tipping over Tom a little. The scent of his hair filled Will’s chest so fully that he didn’t want to exhale, to let it go.

Their walk home was cool, the wind nipping at their heels as they walked to Will’s flat. They weren’t in a hurry, though, taking an easier pace than most of the traffic around them.

As the wind blew, Will could swear he could smell snow in the air.

When they reached his door, Will dug through his pockets for a moment, trying to find his keys. “Do you ever feel like maybe we were supposed to meet?” he asked softly, startling himself when he felt the words leave him.

“Do you mean like fate or something?”

Will slid the key in to the lock, feeling like he might be ruining everything. But he couldn’t lie to Tom, not really. “Yes,” he replied. He steeled himself for a moment before he felt ready to face Tom again, but even then, he wasn’t ready for the look on Tom’s face.

His eyes were intense, as if he was trying to read Will’s mind through sight alone, his jaw set again. Looking back on it, Will could swear he could see the exact moment when Tom made up his mind. The moment that the decision travelled across his face, his mouth opening to take one last shaky breath.

Tom’s lips crashed into Will’s, sending them tumbling back into the entryway through the slightly opened door. Will managed to keep his footing, supporting Tom as their lips broke apart, breathing ragged.

They stared at each other, wide eyed, for a heartbeat. Then, Tom reached up to place his hands on Will’s cheeks and slotted their lips together again, more pressure than anything else at this point. For a stilted moment, Will combed through everything he knew about the past, rifling through every memory he’d had of Blake from Schofield’s eyes. This wasn’t…he didn’t remember this. But the longing in his chest felt the same, like a part of Schofield had wanted this, the pain of it shredding him apart just as it did to Will now.

Will wrapped his fingers into the sleeves of Tom’s jacket, letting the desperate pull take over. He let himself breathe Tom in as his lips parted, finally tasting him on his tongue. Tom made a tiny noise in the back of his throat that Will could feel rattling through him.

Pulling back slightly, Tom pressed a line of kisses across Will’s cheek and down towards his neck. “Yes,” he mumbled breathily against the underside of his jaw.

“What?” Will asked. He tipped back his head naturally, making space for Tom.

“Yes, I think we were supposed to meet,” Tom said, pressing the words into Will’s skin. “I saw you and just _knew_ , like I found something I didn’t know I was looking for.”

In his chest, Will’s desperation bloomed, spreading its petals as it coalesced into something completely new. Gold and blue overlaying the khaki sepia tones that had filled his life for so long. Burying his hand in Tom’s hair, Will pressed their lips together, soft and lingering and near painful with all of the long years spent aching after him.

Tom melted into him, almost as if his soul had been yearning after Will with that same ache, too.

It snowed all night, dampening the sounds outside. It clung to Tom’s hair as he stood on Will’s front stoop when he finally decided to leave for the night, neither of them ready to step away first. But, eventually, Tom managed to pull himself back with one last lingering kiss, his whispered goodbye dancing across Will’s face. Warm in the cold air.

As he lay in bed watching the snow falling, Will wondered if maybe the world outside had simply stopped moving. Everything halting in place, aligning itself into a new pattern.

Something a little kinder.

A soft crescendo of talk radio pulled Will from sleep, the morning still dark and inky on the other side of his bedroom window. He sighed softly, letting his dreams cling to him for once. The girls dancing in a grassy field, Blake’s voice lulling him, their laughter comingling in the air. It was a rare night, having so many of the best memories Schofield left him with piled on top of each other.

There was a huge part of him that held onto Schofield’s memories if only to keep himself from circling around the phantom sensation of Tom’s skin underneath his fingertips, the way their kisses turned from nearly aggressive in their hunger towards shy and gentle over the course of night.

He pressed his hand over his eyes as he chuckled, the irony of him gathering up delusional dreams of the past to fight off the desperation for the waking dreams of yesterday evening striking him. Will had spent so long trying to temper his expectations, convincing himself fully that he would be satisfied with whatever Tom wanted to give him, that the idea that Tom wanted _Will_ seemed ludicrous. Delightfully mental.

Everything seemed so normal: Tom’s usual morning messages before he left for class, the same crush of morning commuters on the train, the same walk through campus to the library. But the city seemed like a brighter place, the snow dusting the world in a thin layer of white.

Purnima stumbled to a halt when she walked into the break room. Her scarf hung limply from her hands as she said, “Wow, what happened to you?”

“What?” Will glanced down at himself, looking for anything that was amiss.

“It’s just—I mean, you always…” She gestured around him vaguely. “You actually got a full night’s rest last night, didn’t you?”

Will laughed softly, grateful that he hadn’t accidentally arrived to work looking like an idiot in his haze. “Yes, I did. Is this what normal people feel like when they’re rested? It’s kind of a strange feeling.”

“I wouldn’t know,” she replied, voice soft and questioning. “Can Tom stay late every night? This is kind of blowing my mind.”

“Tom’s flatmates are right nosy bastards,” Will replied with no real heat to his words.

“I won’t argue with you on that one, but I can’t say I blame them. I’m literally _dying_ to know what happened. Please, Will, if you have a heart, please, just tell me something. Anything!” she pleaded as she followed him down the hall towards the offices.

“Since when have I had a heart?” he joked, weaving through the desks.

“Since Tom bloody Blake showed up!” Purnima cried. She smiled apologetically at an archivist who hissed at her to be quiet, pointing at the phone held up to his ear. “Seriously,” she said much quieter, “One thing, just tell me one thing, and I’ll shut up. Promise.”

“Promise?” Will asked, trying not to laugh outright in Purnima’s pouting face. Holding up a finger, he said, “Fine, fine, I’ll tell you one thing. _One._ ”

“Oh, thank Christ!”

Will turned to look at her seriously, gravely. “Tom poached eggs last night. It was rather impressive.”

Purnima’s eyes opened wide, staring at him like he had just told her the sky was orange today. “You can’t just tell me _that_ and expect me to be satisfied!” she hissed.

“You said one thing, I told you one thing,” Will shrugged.

“God, you really don’t have a heart!” she cried, ignoring the grunt of frustration from the archivist across the room from them. “You’re a lot more of a raging jerk when you’re well rested, you know that?”

“Fantastic, we have so much to look forward to.”

Narrowing her eyes, Purnima leaned over the cubicle divider to better peer at Will’s face. “I do believe you just told me _two_ things, and, let me tell you, you really should have led with that one.”

Will didn’t even bother covering his laugh this time.

His day was remarkably average, nothing all that exciting or interesting, yet he found himself looking for any reason to message Tom. Any reason to reach out to him. Sure, this wasn’t exactly a new thought, but now he had even fewer excuses to stop himself from tucking himself into a hidden back corner to send off some message or other out of the sight of his co-workers.

He only hoped that he wasn’t being painfully annoying.

The amount of near immediate responses he got from Tom, though, felt like maybe “annoying” wasn’t the description that Tom would choose for it.

“If I had known that kissing you would make you so talkative, I would have done it ages ago,” Tom said, startling Will as he walked out of work Friday evening, phone already out and a message to Tom mostly typed.

He was sitting casually on the wide stone staircase outside the library, legs extended to a lower step with his ankles crossed, clearly making himself comfortable as he waited. He flipped his notebook closed on his lap, the vague sketch inside disappearing as he tucked it away. While the snow had melted off slightly, the cool air had stayed hovering over the city, but Tom seemed chipper despite it all. His cheeks were flush, gentle pink that made his skin seem smooth and porcelain.

Will bit his lip, trying to keep his mildly embarrassed smile in check. “I wouldn’t really blame that on the kissing,” he mumbled as he tucked his phone back into his bag.

“Oh?” Tom asked, amused and laughing as he stood.

They hadn’t seen each other since Wednesday, since Tom pushed past the borders that Will had so carefully set through his life, and he was sort of expecting everything to feel different now. He wasn’t exactly sure what he had been expecting. It was like he’d been given permission to look a little closer, and, now that he had it, he was loath to look away.

He’d never bothered to register how long Tom’s eyelashes were before now, how dark and thick, and he felt like a complete idiot for missing out on that.

“I just didn’t want to be a bother, I guess,” Will eventually replied, deciding last minute just to be honest as he led them through the campus. “I know you’re busy with classes and your mates and all, so.”

“That doesn’t mean I don’t have time for you.” Tom scuffed the toe of his trainers against the ground as if he had deliberately hurt Will’s self-esteem somehow by not making that clear.

“I know that now.”

The smile on Tom’s face was one Will recognized more from Schofield’s memories than his own life—a little rueful but bright and gentle, like the sun just barely breaking through the clouds.

He tried not to stare at Tom’s lips during their train ride to Will’s flat, but of course Tom knew. Of course.

Will had assumed that Tom had pressed his thumbprints into every corner of his flat by now, but Tom proved him wrong almost immediately. Instead of leaving behind little pieces of himself, Tom began to carve out places that were his—his side of the couch, his seat at the table, his half of the bed. Tom had his preferred places to work on his school essays, spreading out his books across the sitting room floor. He’d practically rearranged Will’s kitchen by now.

It ached in the best possible way how much Will liked seeing remnants of him etched into the most secret, private part of his life. Like Tom was physically here with him even when he wasn’t.

Obviously, though, Will liked it best when he _was_ around.

Tom was stretched out oddly across the couch, his legs dangling over the back, head resting on the armrest, and arms wrapped around Will’s calves like they were a stuffed bear. He’d been neck deep in schoolwork all afternoon, and claimed that this was his five-minute break a half hour ago.

“That can’t be comfortable,” Will said as he flipped the page of his book.

“I could honestly fall asleep, I don’t care,” Tom murmured back, pressing his cheek against Will’s pantleg. “I’ve always been good at sleeping in weird places, though. I swear I’ve fallen asleep standing up a few times.”

Will blinked, the words printed on the page in front of him blurring as his mind pulled images of men propped up against each other in trenches, rifles still held at the ready. It had been necessity, trying to fit in as much sleep as possible whenever and wherever they could. Peeking at Tom’s face, smooth with calm and sleepiness, Will felt his heart tug angrily in his chest. He’d assumed this entire time that Tom’s connection to the past was rather thin, a single thread compared to Will’s chains.

“Tom, tell me about your family,” Will said, throwing caution to the wind, desperate for any type of answer.

“Hm?” he hummed, eyebrows raising before he opened his eyes.

“I mean, you talk about your mother, but is that it? Is it just you and your mum?” Will forged ahead. Could Joseph Blake have followed them here?

Tom shifted to sit up with his back to the armrest, the two of them now facing each other on the couch. “No, I’ve got a younger sister, too. Mum was always working, so we spent a lot of time together growing up. We’d spend all afternoon making up stories and drawing these massively elaborate pictures of it all, ignoring all our chores. But we were still pretty good about taking care of things since mum was so beat by the time she got home. My sister’s right awful at cooking and all that, which is how I learned. Someone had to feed us,” Tom chuckled, clearly happy memories despite the seriousness of their circumstances.

“Oh,” Will said softly. A part of him felt abject disappointment that there was no brother, nothing to link together his own experiences with Tom’s, no concrete vision of the past chasing Tom’s heels. Will immediately felt flush with guilt for wishing his pain on him. “I can’t even imagine.”

“It wasn’t so bad. I liked to help, and it’s come in handy, clearly,” Tom continued with a smirk.

Will hid his smile behind his book as he muttered, “Shut up.”

“What about you? You never talk about your family, really, except that one time you mentioned your granddad’s place.”

“That’s because there’s not much to say,” Will shrugged, but he lowered his book to look over at Tom as he gathered his thoughts. “I’m not exactly close with my parents. I think they had a difficult time connecting to me, trying to find some kind of common ground, what with all of my...” He waved his hand as he said, “issues.”

He used to wonder if all his parents saw was a diagnosis, like he was just some living manifestation of misplaced PTSD and fear instead of their son. It wasn’t like he made their job any easier, choosing to bury his head in his books and his notebooks full of scratched out writing.

Tom watched him, his eyebrows lowered heavy over his eyes, as he sorted through the messy childhood feelings he’d done his best to pack away years ago.

“You know, you can talk to me about that kind of shit, if you want. I won’t judge you for it. I _don’t_ judge you,” Tom said, running his hand along Will’s calves reassuringly. “The nightmares and all that can’t scare me off.”

Will placed his book carefully on the side table and crawled over Tom, lowering himself onto his chest. Their lips fit together as easy as breathing.

He let his lips tell his feelings to Tom, deep and slow, communicating in a language so much deeper than Will felt he could ever achieve with his words. His fingers slid along Tom’s chest to rest over the solid pulse of his heart, hoping that it was enough to paint the space between them with how much his soul cried out for him. Will could feel something _more_ boiling under the surface, desperate to crawl out of his chest and into Tom’s, but he contained it just barely.

And when they stumbled down the hall towards his bedroom, half focused on just _getting there_ and half on working off each other’s clothes, Will felt his restraint to keep it in nearly breaking as Tom panted, “Jesus, thank fuck you’re mine,” into his neck.

Will wasn’t sure if Tom even realized he’d said it aloud, but it burned through him, the flowering thing in his chest catching light.

For the first time, Will felt with complete certainty that his feelings had very little to do with Schofield, with Blake, and everything to do with Tom. With this present moment, in the places where their skin connected. Tom was perfect and real and alive and _here,_ and Will was gone for him.

He was in love.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, Tom is singing "Thinking Out Loud" with inserted f words. Yes, this is a thing I have done.


	4. Chapter 4

Lights were streaking across the sky in a dizzying blur in Will’s dreams, casting stark, demonic shadows on the world. He could barely move, but he knew he had to _run_ , to run towards the fall. The fall, the darkness. There were shouts behind him, bullets singing against the walls on either side. Yet, the harder he tried to run, the more the world seemed to tilt, slipping from under his feet and burning him up. There was a baby reaching out for him, someone’s throat gasping for air under his palms, Blake’s blood weeping across his skin and sinking into his heart.

Tom’s voice, soft and sleepy, called out his name.

He gasped for air, clawing his way out of the blur, but the cold tide pulled him further and further downstream.

Hands reached gently around his chest, too gentle for the storm trapped inside his head. He opened his eyes to darkness and cold night air against his sweaty skin. It took him multiple gasping breaths before he realized where he was.

Home. His own bed. Night time.

Curled behind him, Tom hummed out a sleepy sound as he pulled himself closer to Will, his hands splayed over his chest. Pressing his shaking hands over Tom’s, Will forced himself to breathe long and controlled, to let the tension seep from his shoulders. A part of him hated that he still had to fight back the past in his dreams despite being held so closely by it during the day.

But Tom did make it easier to bear.

“What’s it tonight?” he mumbled as he shifted up to burrow his forehead against the fine hairs along the base of Will’s head.

“The flares,” was all Will could manage to say.

Tom rearranged the sheets to cover him again and made a tiny noise of understanding despite the fact that Will knew he didn’t. What could he even say if Tom ever did?

“It’s over now,” Tom sighed, warm breath creeping along the back of Will’s neck.

Will carefully rolled over inside the ring of Tom’s arms to press their foreheads together, to spread his hands wide across Tom’s back. He breathed in, still shaking, but growing steadier, and wished, wished like hell, that Tom would be right one day. That the war raging across time to live inside his head would end.

“You know,” Tom mentioned as he spread raspberry jam across a slice of toast the next morning, his hair a mess and his face still soft with sleep. “You can actually talk to me about your nightmares. Might be helpful.”

“Dreams,” Will corrected immediately. He fussed over the teapot, feeling tightly drawn, stretched and thin. “Talking about them won’t make them go away,” he mumbled.

“Yeah, but it’s better than pretending like they’re not happening,” Tom countered.

Will pressed his fingers against the bench, breathing hard but desperate to keep himself together. Images flooded through his mind, filling his lungs like the dark water, like the dust. _Anything_ was better than talking about it. “Please, not now— ” he finally managed to say, uncertain when he’d ever feel ready to talk about this.

“Alright, alright,” Tom sighed. But his voice was kind as he pressed his hand between Will’s shoulder blades, reassuring and grounding, and Will felt like he could maybe catch his breath again.

The spring seemed to set in early, tiny flowers pushing through the dark, cool earth as the snow faded. In so many ways, it felt like this was the first proper spring of Will’s life, like he too was pushing his head up through the ground to find the sun. Very little had actually changed about the world, about him, but maybe some of Tom’s endless optimism was finally rubbing off on him.

Purnima set a brown paper sack in front of Will on the break table one day in March, a clear gift from her mother. Will shook his head gently, ready for some new silly cure-all. Instead, inside was a single mini Bakewell.

“What’s this?” he said as he pulled the white and pink striped tart from the bag.

“Mum sends her congratulations. She said you look like you finally found a cure for your sleep. At least, that’s what she said told me after the last pic I sent her.” Purnima propped up her feet on the chair beside Will’s, letting her lean back in her own as she peeled a mandarin. “She might be prouder of you right now than she ever was of me. I’ve never gotten a congratulatory tart, so great work.”

“That’s horribly kind,” Will murmured, smiling down at the little treat. “Although, honestly, she should have made the thing for Tom. Do you want half?”

“Only if you’re offering.” She paused her peeling as she watched him dig around the drawers for a knife. “That’s kind of the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard, though, Tom helping you actually sleep.”

Will cut the tart into four equal slices, then handed Purnima a fork to eat her portion straight out of the tin. “It’s not like having him around is some kind of magic cure, but it really is easier to fall asleep with something there with you. Even after…” Will shook his head, knowing that it was stupid to be frustrated over the dreams still. Even if he never stopped having them, he wanted Tom there when he woke up.

“Will, I’m really, really happy for you,” she said softly. She placed her hand delicately over his, the most obvious affection she’d ever shown him. “Your beautiful, inexplicable love life is the only thing that’s keeping me going right now.”

“Ah, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop,” he laughed. But he did flip his palm around to squeeze her hand for a moment, a silent acknowledgement of gratitude.

“I mean, really, I’m just waiting for you two to move in together and raise about fifteen million puppies or whatever little pet Tom’s inclined to, because lord knows that you won’t tell him no,” she said around her mouthful of tart.

Tapping his fingers on the tabletop, he said nothing for a beat. Then, “Isn’t it too soon to ask him to move in with me, though?”

Purnima’s eyes grew wide as she stared over at him. “Oh, my god, you’ve been thinking about it, haven’t you? I can’t believe this, my tiny idiot son is finally getting his shit together, I’m so bloody proud!”

“No! It’s just an honest question!” Will huffed, cutting at his slice of Bakewell more aggressively than it really called for.

But Purnima just waved his words away. “Will, sweetheart, there is no set in stone ‘too soon,’ there’s only what’s right for you and for Tom. What that looks and feels like is entirely up to you two.” She sat forward, watching his face like a hawk as she asked, “Does it _feel_ too soon to ask?”

Frowning down at the little tin before him, Will let out a long breath. “I have no idea.”

“Then, talk to him about it. If it’s bothering you, then he deserves to know,” she responded, like everything was simple and straightforward and easy in his life.

The problem was that Will had been thinking about this for far too long to be normal by now. Ever since Tom first stepped foot in his flat, his subconscious had been loaded with ideas on how to make Tom stay—the more permanent, the better. But he knew he had to do this correctly, that losing Tom now would tear through everything, would rend the safest places he’d created for himself in half.

Asking him to stay was all he could think about some nights, standing in the entryway watching Tom pull on his shoes as he made his way out the door for the night. Every day, it was getting harder for Will to watch him go.

But he wasn’t sure how much was too much to ask for, not when Tom was giving him far more than he had ever imagined.

Hell, Will wasn’t even brave enough to tell Tom that he was in love with him yet.

Sometimes he wondered if Tom knew, could feel it in the way Will’s eyes would linger on him regardless of what he was doing, the way he’d catch at Tom’s wrist, loosely holding him close. Tom had always been able to see in a little deeper than anyone else had been able to, why would this be any different?

“I hate myself for choosing to be a history major sometimes,” Tom sighed, squinting at the cardstock spread on the table in front of them. Making phase boxes to store fragile books was tedious, but great for breaking Tom from his essay writing rut. Not that Tom cared, seeming far more interested in whatever he was sketching on the back of a sheet of copy paper.

“You could change your major if it’s not working out,” Will replied gently as he marked a fold in the thick cardstock. “You shouldn’t feel caged in.”

Tom sighed deeply, tilting his head back towards the ceiling. “You make it sound so easy, like my mum wouldn’t march here in a heartbeat to guilt me for wasting so much time and effort and money on what I’ve already gotten done.” He rubbed his hand roughly through his hair, looking mildly dishevelled in an intentional way. Nothing like the mess of Will’s hair in the morning. “No, I like studying history, it’s just a bit stressful right now.”

“I don’t think you’ve ever told me why you chose to study it,” Will said as he bent the marked cardstock into place, hoping that a minor change in subject would put Tom more at ease.

Lifting his shoulders, Tom scrunched up his face in thought. “It’s a bit hard to explain. Like maybe I can connect everything together if I just have the full story, that kind of feeling. Like having all of the parts together will sort of bring everything into focus. Does that make any sense?” Tom blinked up at Will, eyes almost begging him to understand.

But Will didn’t need to pretend, thinking of the years spent chasing after the ghost of Schofield’s past and the folders hidden from sight in his wardrobe. “Yes, it does,” Will said, reaching over to smooth Tom’s hair.

Tom smiled a bit shyly under Will’s hand, relief clear in the way his shoulders relaxed. “It’s a bit funny. Sometimes I feel like you know what I’m going to say before I do,” he sighed a bit dreamily when Will resumed his work. “I never thought that people didn’t understand me or anything, but it’s different with you. Deeper. Everything is, really.”

There was something so arresting about Tom laying out his feelings, straightforward and honest like they weren’t absolutely cutting up Will to pieces.

And if Will let Tom follow him into one of the back corners of the workroom, well out of the way of the collection materials and the doorway, and press him against the wall with his body and his lips, no one really needed to know except them.

Will woke with sweating palms, heaving breaths, and tears clinging to his lashes at maybe two in the morning on April 6th. He’d honestly been tempted to not even try to sleep, but he’d slipped off in the middle of whatever was on the telly, too antsy for anything to hold his attention. The flat felt cold, so empty as he stumbled to the bathroom to splash some water on his face.

He’d wanted to ask Tom to stay the night before, but he’d been working with a few classmates on a project all afternoon, so he wasn’t even around to ask. Sure, Will had typed up a message at least five or six times, innocuous requests for him to stop by after he was done, but his resolve had failed every time that his finger hovered over the send button. Will knew that the dreams were coming, the worst of them all, and he wasn’t eager for Tom to witness that, even if he added to Will’s comfort.

Blake always died.

After a lifetime of Schofield’s memories, Will had lost count of the number of times he’d watched the life slip from Blake’s face, his hands warm with his blood. It never got any easier, only burrowing deeper and deeper into the most tender part of Will’s soul. But it was always so much worse, so much more real on this night.

The sounds of the television, still on in the sitting room, ricocheted around the bathroom, but all he could hear was the echoes of Blake, pleading. _Tell me you know the way._ Will blinked at his reflection in the mirror, frowning at the depth of the dark circles underneath his bloodshot eyes. Maybe it was for the best Tom wasn’t around, he looked right awful. Sighing, he reached for the tap, but he paused as he took in the vanity. Tom’s toothbrush stood in the holder next to his own.

It was such a little thing, just a tiny sign of life, but Will felt tears pressing against his eyes as he laughed, wet and crazed sounds.

He wandered through the flat, mentally cataloguing all of the marks Tom had left behind in his space. Nothing substantial, nothing that forced Will to live any differently than usual, but it was like he had so naturally moved over to let Tom settle in next to him. Will pulled one of Tom’s jackets from the entryway, draping it over his shoulders as he did his rounds, the barest hint of his scent catching at Will’s attention. It wasn’t until he had settled back on the couch, Tom’s jacket draped over him like a blanket, that he saw it hiding under the couch table: a notebook.

Will flipped through the notes, Tom’s messy handwriting filling each page, and he felt some semblance of calm return bit by bit. There was nothing remarkable hidden here, just the work he’d quietly put in, pencil and pen on paper. Well, except for a single folded sheet tucked into the back cover.

Even in the low light, Will recognized himself immediately, his face in profile rendered with clear care. The lines that formed his image were loose, feathery as they hinted at the shadows falling across his cheeks, everything looking so soft and realistic despite the stylistic details. He looked intensely off the page as if staring into some distant place. Will found himself giggling, thinking of Tom covertly sketching while Will read.

Jesus Christ, he loved him.

Tucking the notebook to his chest, laid underneath the jacket, Will let his eyes close, finally drifting off to softer dreams.

The notebook sat securely in Will’s locker at work all day, a bright spot in a usually horrible, grey day. He found himself grinning like an idiot to himself as he worked, his natural anxiety over the date mingling with the heady feeling of knowing one more thing that Tom kept tucked away. It felt a little like he’d peeked into some private part of Tom’s heart, seeing himself drawn with so much obvious affection.

Over the day, the feeling grew, expanding in his chest aggressively, building until he couldn’t remember any reasons not to just find Tom now. Instead of heading back to his own flat like he usually would, he walked the opposite direction across campus towards the flatshares that lined the university.

He’d never actually been to Tom’s place, both of them seeming to prefer the quiet and privacy of Will’s flat, but he felt like maybe it too would provide some kind of insight into the parts of himself that Tom was still slowly showing to Will.

Will paused outside of the door to Tom’s flat, centring himself in case Tom wasn’t home. The last thing he needed was to look like an idiot in front of the people Tom lived with. He was extremely grateful for his moment of collection when the door swung open to reveal one of Tom’s flatmates, a short brunette girl who Will couldn’t remember the name of for the life of him.

“Hi, I’m here to—”

“Tom’s in his room, I think,” she said, cutting through his words with a knowing smile. Waving him inside, she led him through the tight sitting room, crowded with chairs and couches, one of which was occupied by another flatmate.

The hallway leading off was dark and narrow, lined with doors decorated with various posters and nametags. She stopped at a door halfway down the hall, its only decoration a sketchy picture of Tom with a cartoon thought bubble with a piece of pizza inside hovering over his head, all rendered in crayon.

Pushing open the door, she rapped her knuckles against the doorframe. “Oi, Blake, your boyfriend’s here.”

Will leaned around the girl to peer inside Tom’s room. It was tiny, the furniture crammed into what little space there was. Clothes were draped over the back of the desk chair, pens and papers spread across the desk’s surface, a tiny bookshelf beside it stacked with books and loose papers. There were a few posters on his walls, mostly colourful cartoon posters for shows written half in English and half in Japanese, with a single sketch pinned beside Tom on the bed. He lay spread eagle with his laptop propped open on his chest, notebooks and notes spread around him in a thin layer.

Tom stabbed at his keyboard, fumbling to his feet when he saw them. “Will? Hey, hi, uh, did I miss a message or something—?” he stammered.

“Have fun,” his flatmate giggled as she disappeared back down the hallway.

Will tried to hold back his own laughter as Tom leaned out his door to scowl at her retreating back before closing his door. Shifting his jaw a little, a nervous tick, Tom smoothed his t-shirt as he glanced up at him. “So, is everything okay? I wasn’t exactly expecting you—not that I’m not crazy happy you’re here!” He held out his hands as if he could contain any negative fallback from his own words. “I just would have, you know, tidied a bit if I had known.”

Tom’s voice faded as he spoke, watching as Will stepped towards his bed, eyes trained on the sketch hanging on the wall just in the sightline Tom would have while laying down. This portrait of Will was in the same style, but he was smiling in this one, eyes lowered and hair a little wild.

“I didn’t think I was a particularly easy person to draw, but I guess you’ve proven me wrong,” he said, pulling out the notebook from his bag and turning to hold it out to Tom.

“Oh. Um. Yes.” Tom carefully took the notebook from Will’s hand like he was afraid that it would burst into flames, much like the colour on his cheeks. He flipped to the back where Will knew the sketch of himself was tucked away. “You, uh, actually are kind of hard to get right,” he mumbled.

“You’ve practised?” Will asked, leaning against Tom’s unmade bed, feeling oddly giddy about this entire situation.

Tom fidgeted, smoothing his hand along his forehead and hiding away his eyes for a moment. “A few times,” he said. He glanced up at Will through his eyelashes, that deep blue that Will wanted to paint into the backs of his eyelids. “I know it’s a bit weird, but I don’t know, I just like…” Tom gestured at Will before mumbling, “your face.”

“Last I checked, it’s probably a good thing to like your boyfriend’s face,” Will laughed. He held out his hands to Tom, silently asking him to come closer.

“I guess so,” Tom replied as he stepped between Will’s hands. “It just still feels a little mental that you are, you know? My boyfriend.” He ran his fingers through Will’s hair, tilting his head back a little, him looking down at Will for once.

Will pressed his hand to the place where he’d felt Blake’s life leaving him this morning, a part of him relaxing as his fingers connected with Tom’s unblemished stomach. Smiling up at him, Will felt the shackles of this horrible day loosen just a little. Blake and Schofield never got to have this, never had a chance for this, but they weren’t them.

It was Tom’s hands in his hair, Will’s heart in his chest, his shallow breath before he said, “Tom?” It wasn’t near enough, three words to contain the depth of his ache, his lifelong search, but it had to do for now. “I love you.”

And it was Tom who smiled like the sun, brighter than the blinding flashes of his dreams, who murmured back, “I love you, too.”

It was also the two of them who made a complete mess of Tom’s school things, now haphazardly piled across the floor, laying where they fell in their haste. But it didn't seem to matter to Tom, sitting up as if only to look back at Will laying across the bed underneath him. He was shirtless and looked rather golden and soft like a painting, all smooth strokes of some artist’s design.

"I feel like I dreamed you up most days," Tom mumbled, his hand hovering over Will's chest just shy of touching him.

Will couldn't help but think of Blake's laughter ringing around his head in the best of his own dreams. _What would Schofield have given up for this chance_ , he wondered. Reaching up, Will gently pulled Tom's hand to rest against his skin.

Tom propped open the window in the sitting room, the gentle breeze rustling his school papers and the pages of Will’s book. He breathed in the late spring air deeply, lost in his own world as he watched the world outside.

“Hey, let’s go get curry,” he said, nose still pressed against the mesh screen.

With the summer fast approaching, so too was Tom’s final exams, the essays and copious notes piling up around him. Will didn’t miss it, hated seeing Tom so exhausted at the end of the day, and he found himself almost unable to deny him anything in his endless pursuit to relieve even a little of the pressure on Tom’s back.

So, they got curry.

As he tore his naan into increasingly smaller bits, Tom cleared his throat for maybe the fourth time since arriving. Will was tempted to simply ask him to spit it out, but he knew that Tom would probably just clam up in frustration if he pushed. Sure, he’d eventually fess up, but it took a lot longer than simply waiting. So, instead, he aimed the opposite direction. “I don’t know if I mentioned, but—”

“My mum wants you to come home with me,” Tom interrupted, apropos of nothing.

Will shifted slightly in his seat, the image of Blake’s mother forming in the back of his mind unbidden. Schofield had kept in touch with her, he had a thin stack of letters to prove it packed away in his box of research. Her handwriting had faded, but Will had carefully read each word. She was the last, all of the Blake men stolen from her far too soon.

“After final exams. She wants to meet you.” Tom continued.

“She wants me to come home with you,” Will repeated slowly. His brain was still surfacing from the past as Tom watched him with obvious nerves, everything a little sluggish. “You talk about me with your mum?”

“Of course,” Tom replied, eyes fixed on his food shyly. “I talk about you all the time to about anyone who’ll listen.”

“Oh.” Will bit back a smile.

“It’s a funny thing, you know? I swear you can tell what I’m going to say before I do sometimes, like you know me in and out. But I never know exactly what you’re going to say, always a bit closed off, so I just have to keep talking until I get it right, I guess,” Tom said. “So, yeah, I’ve mentioned you to mum before. And she’d like you to come, but I haven’t given her an answer or anything yet, so it’s up to you.”

Will sat forward slowly, feeling the strangest mix of hurt and flattery at Tom’s words. Tom knew him better than anyone really, and yet he still wanted more of Will. The thought felt like a weight in Will’s chest. “Is this her ploy to make sure you go home this summer?” he joked, aiming to put them both more at ease.

“Pretty sure, yeah,” Tom sighed. But Will’s tactic was working, his shoulders slumping forward a little. “It’s not like I _wasn’t_ going to visit, but she knows I can’t change any plans around with your holiday leave submitted and all that.”

Will nodded, almost recognizing the hint of Blake’s mother in Tom’s mother’s actions. “Your mum’s a bit crafty, isn’t she? It would be nice to get out of the city a bit.”

“I don’t want you to feel obligated or anything,” Tom mumbled, stirring his curry with a piece of naan, but the flush of his cheeks betrayed his feelings so clearly. It was endearing to know the inside of his heart enough to know what it looked like from the outside.

“I’d like to go. You could finally show me all the drawings you made as a child, all those stories you made up.”

“No. Absolutely not. No way in hell,” Tom said, shaking his head resolutely. “They’re so cringy, it’s awful. I don’t even like remembering that they exist. In fact, I should probably go home and burn them all.”

“Which is why you spent an entire night telling me about them. Huh, makes sense,” Will shrugged, trying to temper his smile at Tom’s deep pout.

Tom’s pout turned into a frown when Will couldn’t hide his mirth anymore. “I can’t believe I used to think you were so kind and respectful and shit. You’re literally the worst, I can’t believe you would treat your poor boyfriend this way.”

“I really fooled you,” Will chuckled.

But there was still something so fragile and precious about the word “boyfriend” on Tom’s lips, knowing that he was describing _them._ That this was their life now, curry and talk of their mothers and their childhoods in between long evenings in the long shadows of his flat, that he could reach out in the night, and Tom would be there most nights. After so many long years of living some kind of half-life, that Will could feel the sun on his face, breaking through the mists of the past.

When Will walked into the break room after an afternoon shift helping a graduate student in one of the reading rooms, he paused, almost startled that Tom wasn’t waiting for him at the table. He’d messaged him in advance, knowing that Tom was volunteering today and would be looking for him. Instead, there was just a stack of Tom’s school things piled on the empty table.

Halfway down the pile was Tom’s sketchbook.

After Will found that first drawing, Tom had slowly begun to share his sketches and doodles in tiny increments. A sketch of Will’s kitchen one day, maybe a squiggly tree in the corner of his history notes the next, a quick rendering of Purnima a few days later. Yet, despite Will’s appreciation, Tom always shied away from his compliments, still clearly self-conscious.

He’d never been given a peek inside Tom’s sketchbook. It didn’t look like much, just a spiral bound black book, yet the mystery of it made it seem like something else entirely.

Will knew that he shouldn’t, but he slid the sketchbook from the pile carefully. He wondered if he would regret it as he flipped through the pages quickly, knowing that the time alone was limited. Pencil sketches filled most of the pages, landscapes and figures in soft greys. On one of the pages near the back, Will stopped, letting the pages settle.

Half-finished and clearly abandoned was a sketch of himself. Only it _wasn’t_.

He recognized the jacket immediately, the distinct pattern of pockets and the shape of the collar, a thin scarf peeking out. His hair was much shorter and matted than his own rather overgrown mane, making his face seem more severe somehow.

This was Schofield.

Will clapped the book shut, his vision swimming slightly. Tom didn’t know, he _couldn’t_ know. Could he? He’d shown no signs of recognizing their connections to the past…Only maybe he had.

 _I saw you, and I just_ knew, he’d said against the curve of Will’s jaw ages ago.

Voices in the hallway forced him from his thoughts, giving him just enough time to slip the sketchbook back into the pile before Tom bid one of the archivists goodbye and turned into the break room.

“Hey,” he said as he strode across the room, his grin so perfect that Will couldn’t help but smile back despite the storm of confusion raging through him.

But maybe none of that really mattered right now, Will thought as he leaned down to meet Tom’s lips fleetingly. Because, in that single moment of connection, he could feel Tom’s smile, could feel it sparking through his veins and chasing off the worst of his worries. Maybe this was a good thing. They both knew.

Will wasn’t alone with this anymore.

“How does one go about asking their boyfriend to move in with them?” Will asked Purnima over lunch the next week. “Asking for a friend, obviously,” he tacked on when she dropped her fork.

“Well, honestly, usually you just _ask_ ,” she huffed as she picked up her fork and inspected it after its fall to the tabletop.

“Yes, I kind of assumed that much, but how does one ensure that they don’t make a fool of themselves in the process? I don’t want to put any extra pressure on Tom when I ask, I want him to know that this is his decision,” Will said.

“I thought this was for a friend?” Purnima asked, leaning over the table to squint at Will’s eyes.

“I’m my own friend,” Will shrugged. “And, to be fair, I’m asking as much for Tom as I am for myself. I don’t want to screw this up and make him feel shitty about something that _should_ be a good thing.”

Purnima sat back and shook her head gently. “Will, sweetheart, I’m convinced Tom would have moved in with you long before you two started boinking—”

_“Jesus.”_

“—and, let me tell you, he’s only gotten more attached since then,” she continued, ignoring Will’s exasperation. “Seriously, he wants you to meet his mum. That’s _massive_. That’s some long-term commitment stuff. Just ask him. It doesn’t matter if it’s right or not, just effing do it, and it’ll turn out great.”

Will bit his lip, but he could still feel a grin growing on his face. Maybe Purnima was right, maybe all that was holding them back was Will’s hesitance to mess everything up.

He’d always been good at avoiding the things that ate at him. His entire life was spent blocking out the different parts of his life to keep the past from seeping too far into the present, numbing out the pain as best he could. But the pain hurt less with Tom near, knowing that he wasn’t standing solitary against this anymore. Sure, he still couldn’t bring himself to actually talk to Tom about everything yet, but he could feel that someday soon he would be able to. He could be honest.

Tom loved him, that was probably all he really needed, right?

He was already in Will’s flat by the time he got home from work, his laptop open on the couch table in the soft afternoon light. Tom had essentially set up camp in Will’s sitting room, pushing through as much work as possible as the end of term crept closer and closer. That fact alone put a tiny part of Will’s anxiety to rest.

“Hey. I put the kettle on already, should be ready if you give it a minute,” Tom greeted him, voice a little tired and eyes bleary.

“Thank you,” Will murmured, stepping over his papers carefully to press a kiss to the crown of Tom’s head. His hair was getting longer and curlier by the day, and Will was a tiny bit obsessed with it.

The kettle whistled shrilly from the kitchen and broke Will from his tiny reverie, lost in Tom’s scent for a moment. He felt oddly light as he busied himself in the kitchen, brewing the tea and running through a script of how best to ask Tom to stay, to gather up his books and knickknacks and anime posters and just fucking _stay._

Will slid Tom’s cup of tea next to him on the couch table, hoping not to break his concentration. It wasn’t like he was stalling for time or anything, but Will couldn’t deny that he was glad to edit his script to perfection.

 _You know how much I want you to stay,_ he thought, but no, that was too presumptuous. How about, _I like myself better when you’re here_? Will sighed into his tea.

“Ah, shit!” Tom swore, frowning down at his chest, a thin line of tea seeping down the white cotton of his t-shirt. “I swear to god, it’s been one of those fucking days,” he groaned as he stood.

“I can get you another shirt. I had a few of yours in the wash,” Will offered.

“No, it’s alright. You just got home, and I need a break anyways,” Tom huffed, waving at Will to sit back down before shuffling off to the bedroom.

“They’re hanging in the wardrobe, far left,” Will called at Tom’s retreating back, feeling almost fuzzy with the domesticity of it all, glowing with the idea that he could just have this all the time. It felt so tantalizing and lovely, just barely in his grasp.

He tipped back his head, smiling at the ceiling, his script forgotten.

“Will.” Tom’s voice was so quiet, but with a weight that cut across the ambient noise. When Will turned to look over at him in the bedroom doorway, he was still in his tea stained shirt, his face pale. “What is this?”

Tom held up the folder labelled “Thomas Blake.”

The floor beneath Will seemed to fall away, the rosy thoughts of a moment ago burning up like a flare in the night sky. He’d worked so hard to separate out the past from his present, to try to live in this present moment with this version of Tom, the one who wanted to be with him, but the past was never, never done with him.

“Tom—” Will murmured, his voice trembling as he slowly stood. “Tom, please—” he begged, but he had no idea what he wanted, what he was asking of Tom.

“What the hell is this?” Tom asked again. He held the folder out like a brand, accusatory and shaking in his grasp, his voice rising as the situation began to sink in. It sounded strangled in his throat, almost panicked. “What the fuck are these things?” he asked, flipping open the folder to expose the evidence of Blake’s life. The photos, the letter to Joseph Blake, the gold ring.

“I can explain—” Will said, forcing his breath to stay steady despite the shake of his hands as he held them out to Tom.

“Please!” Tom threw up his free hand, eyes growing wilder, glassy with tears the more Will floundered to collect himself. “Seriously, I’d _love_ to hear what you think can explain _this.”_ He reached for the photo of Blake with the other reinforcement soldiers, holding it out for both Blakes to stare out at Will. Waiting.

Will swallowed. “My great-grandfather served with a Thomas Blake. That’s him,” he said, each word feeling like it was being torn from his chest. It had been years since he had been honest about any of these things, years since he’d talked about Schofield or Blake like they were real instead of just nightmares. He’d spent years trying to rend them from his reality, but he hadn’t. He _couldn’t_.

He’d failed.

“This is real? This is a real photo?” Tom shook the photo of Blake slightly as he clearly tried to keep his voice calm.

“Yes, it’s real,” Will replied, taking careful steps towards him, gauging his reaction as he neared. Tom seemed so lost, so confused, and Will couldn’t really blame him, but he needed to make this better.

“A real man with _my_ name and _my_ face?”

Will nodded as he stopped just beyond Tom’s reach. “This was research for my thesis. I promise it’s all authentic.”

A strange look passed over Tom’s eyes. He flipped over the photo to look down at Blake, serious and straight backed in sepia tones. “You knew,” Tom said in a dark undertone. “You knew this _entire time_ , and you never said anything? I knew that there were things you were keeping from me, but _this?_ This is mental. This is _mental_ , you have to realize that. This can’t be real.” He glowered at Blake, breathing heavy. “Jesus, that’s what you meant, wasn’t it? When you asked me if we were supposed to meet.”

His heart absolutely plummeted to his feet. Will watched the emotions play across Tom’s face, wishing he would just look up to see how much he meant to Will. _Anything_. “I thought that, I don’t know, maybe you knew. I wanted to tell you—”

“No, you didn’t,” Tom interrupted, turning his eyes to Will’s finally, but with sharp, severe steel colouring them. It was painful to meet his eyes as the first tear broke free from Tom’s lashes, trailing down his cheek. “You hid this away, hid it somewhere where you could pretend like it didn’t affect this,” he gestured between them. “You could have told me a million different times, and _you didn’t_.” He turned his glare back down to Blake as if he might burn through the picture with his eyes alone.

He held out his hands, feeling like the dust of the past was settling in his lungs, choking his throat, filling his eyes. While Tom’s tears fell down his cheeks, Will felt like his were trapped behind his eyes, a dam of emotion waiting to break. A flash of a riverbank, the feeling of Blake’s blood cooling and drying on his skin. He said softly, “I know this is mental, I know. But, look, I’m not the only one who was keeping things close to my chest. Your drawings—”

“My drawings? You _looked_ , you looked through—” He cut himself off, a sob catching oddly in his throat. Tom shoved the photo of Blake back in the folder as his jaw worked. “That’s different! That was just…thinking. Just stories. This is…This why you wanted to be with me, wasn’t it?”

“No, Tom, please, it’s not like that,” Will whispered.

But Tom just lifted the photo, the precious only photo of Schofield and Blake together, from the folder. “It kind of looks that way.”

Taking a shaky breath, Will stepped forward a single step to wrap one hand around Tom’s wrist, desperate for some kind of connection before everything fell apart. He felt distinctly like Schofield had as he leapt into the river below, the tide swallowing him and tugging him along regardless of how much he wanted simply to stop. He’d never really given anyone the full story before, but, out of everyone in the world, Tom Blake deserved to know.

Will spoke slowly, trying to lay out the details as carefully as possible. “My dreams. I’ve been dreaming of the war my entire life. The war my great-grandfather lived through, as if I _was_ my great-grandfather. Everything. It’s been this ghost hanging around my shoulders, but Blake was one of the only bright spots he had, that _I_ had. And, when I met you, I needed—I was terrified, but I needed to know. That I wasn’t alone. Everything after that was just…” Will took a breath, feeling hollow as he watched Tom glaring down balefully at the only proof Will had that he wasn’t entirely crazy. “I didn't want to scare you off, but then I thought—or maybe convinced myself that you knew. Do you truly not remember anything?”

Tom didn't even look up, eyes still fixed on the photo in his hand. But he stepped back, breaking their tenuous connection.

“I never expected any of this. Tom, I promise I love you. I promise it’s _you_ I love,” Will pleaded, his hand still reaching out for Tom. Hoping for things he knew were impossible.

“I have to think,” Tom mumbled. He tucked the photos carefully back into the folder, stepped around Will, and packed up his papers and his laptop with a forced kind of calm. Without even looking back, Tom walked out of the flat.

Watching him go, Will felt the weight of silence, louder than bombs ringing in his ears. He was alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, uh, remember how this is tagged as soft angst?  
> I want to thank everyone who has left comments and kudos, they have been sustaining me through one of the most hectic and stressful weeks I've had in ages. I really can't thank you all enough, you're all gems <3


	5. Chapter 5

Purnima practically leapt at Will when he walked into work the next day. He knew he looked like warmed over death, the circles under his eyes deep and smudged. Will hadn’t slept, really, more just dozed off in between bouts of frenzied pacing and heaving emptiness.

“So, how’d it go? Asking Tom?” she giggled, blind to the abject pain pouring off of Will.

“It didn’t,” he replied. His voice sounded about as horrible as he assumed he looked, rusty and aching from the unshed sobs trapped inside his chest.

She stepped in front of him, forcing them to stop just outside the break room. Peering up into his face, her eyebrows pulled down in sympathy. “Will, sweetheart, what on earth happened?”

Will couldn’t meet her eyes, couldn’t face the pity that he knew that he didn’t deserve colouring her face. He’d ruined everything, he’d been laying the bedrock for his downfall long before he ever met Tom, and now he had to live with that. To live with hurting Tom so profoundly. “I happened. He left,” he said lowly.

“What? What the hell do you mean ‘he left?’ As in, ‘he needs time to think about everything’ or ‘he’s broken everything off?’” Purnima persisted, her hands heavy on his shoulders.

“I don’t know,” Will shrugged, turning away from her.

“I _can’t_ believe this,” she murmured, but her hands fell away. Will took that as his cue to leave, desperate to escape the confusion in her voice, her sympathy for him clear on her face. It was too much. Everything was too much.

Will spent his entire afternoon trying to type up a message to Tom that mattered, that said even a tiny quarter of what he wanted to tell him. But every message felt torn and useless. Pathetic. His thoughts from yesterday, his perfect script ran through his head over and over to taunt him.

_You know how much I want you to stay._

He laughed hollowly, the edge of tears clear in his voice. Everything was so quiet that he swore he could hear it echo around him.

Eventually, with the exhaustion of sadness wearing away at the edges of his brain, he finally caved in, pressing send on a half-formed thought as he lay on the floor of the sitting room. “ _If you ever want to talk, I’ll still be here_ ,” he’d typed before collapsing into himself.

A promise.

When he woke hours later, shaking and gasping for breath, Tom still hadn’t replied.

All of the colours of Will’s world seemed to fade away overnight, bleached after the brightness Tom had shone upon him.

He woke up in the morning to grey skies, regardless of the weather, to the ghosts filling his flat. Tom was a phantom here, everything left just as he had it when he walked out Will’s door that last time. Will could almost feel his touch every time he caught sight of something Tom had left behind—his mug in the sink, his stack of papers on the table in the sitting room, his shirts hanging on the left side of the wardrobe. All waiting alongside Will for Tom to return to them.

So much had happened so quickly that Will wondered idly as he lay across the couch—his bed far too empty to be comfortable—whether he was the one who’d dreamed up Tom. The delusions that his therapists had been warning him about manifesting into his waking life, tearing up his reality and whispering all of the things he wanted so desperately, but could never have.

Everything that had been so stable about his life only a week ago felt like an illusion now, just shadows slipping across the walls.

His spare minutes were spent trying to string together scripts in case Tom emerged out of the blue, preparing for millions of scenarios that his heart kept whispering would never happen. Not when there were no chirps on his mobile, no brilliant sunlight smiles on Wednesdays, no one waiting in his sitting room when he arrived home. By not answering, Tom seemed to be sending out his message. Tom didn’t want to see him.

He didn’t really want to see himself, either.

Will tried to find a routine again, slowly building up what little was left. He went to work, moving through the outside world carefully, head lowered. Once he’d scanned the crowds out of some deep-seated need to find something, but now there was nothing to find. He desperately wanted to see Tom, yet, despite all of his scripts, he had no idea what he’d do if he ever did. Cry? Beg for, what, forgiveness? Understanding? A minute of Tom’s time? Was he worth any of those things?

Days passed and nothing shifted. Nothing seemed to numb or fade the way that his dreams did, his brain refused to push off the aching emptiness. Will tried not to fixate on how Tom was doing, how well his studying was going, if he was eating enough, sleeping enough.

Whether he was happier now that he had seemingly rid himself of Will and all of his baggage.

Will knew it wasn’t healthy to stay so fixated, to feel so unable to move on, but he felt he had a tiny bit more room to feel so horrible, given how long he’d been dreaming of Blake.

 _Blake._ Tom had taken the folder with him when he left, and Will figured that it was only fair, given everything that had happened. It hurt, though, to not have what few cherished items his great-grandfather had cared for so dearly. Sometimes, it physically ached not being able to hold Blake’s ring up to the light, but never quite as much as it ached to walk into an empty flat, no songs being hummed under Tom’s breath, no rustle of papers as Tom filled out the spaces that Will didn’t even know could be filled.

It was growing too warm to sleep under Tom’s jacket, abandoned in the entryway so long ago, but it was all Will had left of the warmth Tom used to share so freely.

The campus always seemed like an unfamiliar place when midterm break hit, the tension leading up to finals breaking for a moment just as the summer began to open up around everyone. But Will felt like he was viewing it all through a pane of glass, separate. Something was building, though, forcing its way up inside the hollow places of his chest.

He needed a response. Something. _Anything._

Which was why he found himself staring up at the door to Tom’s flat on Wednesday. This time, he had nothing to give, no reason to sneak through the doors and into Tom’s space, just himself. Just the desperation of a man with very little left to lose.

The same girl as before opened the door, but there was no knowing smile this time.

“He’s not here,” she said, looking supremely uncomfortable as she blocked the entrance, the door open just enough for her to peek out. “I know that sounds like I’m lying to cover for him or something, but he’s really not here.”

“Oh,” Will replied softly. “I believe you. Would you mind mentioning that I stopped by when he gets back?”

She bit her lip, nodding without meeting his eyes. But as he turned to leave, she reached out to him in a strange, aborted motion. “Just—um, just before you go,” she mumbled, still not meeting his eyes. “I just…do you have any idea where Tom might have gone? He said he was just going to be gone for a few days, but none of us know where he went, and he’s been so…quiet, I don’t know.”

Will pressed his lips together to keep the flood of words contained. Why would Tom leave? Where would he even go? “Has he gone home?” Will asked, offering the only idea that sprang to mind.

“I mean…maybe. Makes sense.” She shrugged and pulled back her hand, pressing it to her neck. She looked about as small and worried as Will felt. “I’ll tell him when he gets back.”

“Thank you,” Will said with a tight smile—the best he could do right now.

His commute back to his flat felt like it took ages, his brain stuck circling around how different Tom’s life must be without him. How much more freedom he’d have without Will weighing him down anymore. Will had gotten nothing from this desperate act, but nothing was beginning to look like the only thing he’d ever get.

Three days later, Will got a single message from Tom.

_i cant do this rn_

There was no catharsis when he threw his mobile across the room, no satisfying release of tension at the dull thump of it against the wall. He didn’t even really feel a sense of relief when it was mostly fine save for a scratch across the back and a new dent in the corner.

He felt numb to it all.

“Okay, this is too much,” Purnima sighed as she sat down opposite Will at the breakroom table. “You’re torturing yourself over something you can’t even talk about, and I can’t watch you do it anymore.”

Will sat up a little taller in his chair, feeling almost slighted by Purnima’s phrasing. “I’m doing alright. These things take a while to get over,” he muttered.

“There’s a difference between surviving and living,” she said, her hand reaching out to his on the table. “And I know that some days all we _can_ do is survive, but there comes a point where you have to start living again.”

His eyes fell to their hands on the table, hers so warm and small over his. He wished he could nod along and take her words to heart, but a part of him wondered if he’d ever truly been living, even when he still had Tom. With Schofield’s memories forming so lifelike behind his eyes most nights, he wondered if he could ever shake the adrenaline of simply making it through the day, through the night.

“I feel like you’re a ghost most days,” Purnima murmured.

“I’ve always been a ghost,” Will replied flatly, just the acceptance of the weight of the past.

Purnima yanked at his hand slightly, demanding his attention. “Look, feeling disconnected from the world doesn’t make you a ghost. But living like Tom was the only connection you had to the world? That’s what makes me feel like when I look into your eyes that you’re not looking back. You still have me, you have your family, and you will always have yourself. Those connections matter, too,” she said softly, as if her tone of voice could lessen the pointed stab of her words.

In Will’s mind, he could see the little girls chasing after each other, that feeling of disparity between them and himself. Like he couldn’t bear to hold out his hands to them for fear of…everything. And, yet, they never left. Maybe they did that on purpose, relying on their childlike optimism that if they kept dancing, kept waiting for him to be ready to reach out, that maybe one day he would.

He wondered if Schofield ever found the strength to do that, to hold out his hands to welcome his daughters back into the reality that he lived in.

Will could feel the weight of himself, aching and tired, but maybe he could try. Maybe he could do what Schofield had needed to once upon a time. He wrapped his fingers around Purnima’s and held on.

“I don’t know how long it’ll take, but I’ll try.”

Purnima laughed softly, and a part of him could hear Schofield’s daughters and just the edge of Blake’s voice laughing with her. The relief was clear in her voice as she said, “That’s the spirit.”

When he walked home from work, he turned his face to the grey skies overhead, trying to notice all of the colours that still lived on without Tom. Nothing was quite as beautiful, sure, but there was beauty still as the city bloomed into early summer. Will breathed in, the hint of rain in the air, and tucked a secret hope deep within his chest, the hope that maybe one day Tom would hold out his hands to Will once again.

The hope that Will would be able to reach back, unafraid.

Somehow, in the months since Tom had quietly shifted around Will’s entire life, he’d completely forgotten how to pass the time when he was alone. When Tom hadn’t been around before, Will had sort of just been waiting for him to return. Now that the realization that he likely never would was setting in, Will found himself grasping for literally anything to chase away that thought.

Which was likely why he found himself staring at his mother’s contact info on his mobile, wondering what exactly he needed to say. But Purnima’s insistence that he still had his family after all of this felt like barbed wire caught in his hand, tearing deeper the more he struggled.

He’d been so convinced he was alone this entire time, but maybe that was his fault more than anyone else’s.

His mother answered almost immediately, worry colouring her tone intensely. “Will? Is everything alright?” she asked in a frenzy.

“Yes, everything’s fine,” Will replied, but it rang false even to his own ears.

“Oh,” she said, suddenly calm and quiet. “Hello. How are you?” There was a silence between them, a cord pulled so tightly that both were uncertain of how to speak over it.

Will took a slow breath, trying to push back the instinct to cut this conversation off as quickly as possible. “I…I’ve been better,” he answered honestly. At her tiny questioning noise, he continued, “I've been…I was seeing someone. But things are sort of…up in the air right now. I don’t know.”

“I’m so sorry to hear that.” The sincerity, the openness of voice pressed against Will’s chest. “This person, was it that friend of yours from last time?”

He nodded, knowing that she couldn’t see him, but he felt so clumsy, stumbling and stuttering as he tried to form any of the words he needed to talk about this coherently. “Yes. That was…We weren’t dating yet, back then, but that was him.” The words caught in his throat for a moment before he could manage to get them out. “Tom. His name is Tom.”

“Will, darling, I know how hard it is for you to let people in. I can’t imagine how difficult this must be.”

Pressing his hand over his mouth, he forced himself to stay upright, to stay connected to the sound of his mother breathing in his ear. It had been ages since he’d let himself cry, but it was his only outlet now, the only way to relieve the pressure building inside him. The tears pooled along his lashes and slipped down his cheeks.

She must have heard the change in his breathing, saying, “Your father and I, we’re always here if you need us. I know we’ve not been the best at keeping in touch or knowing how to support you in the ways you needed us to, but we love you. I always will.”

“Thank you,” he finally managed to say, thick and mangled but there.

It took him a few moments to collect himself again, fighting out for any sense of calm. “That wasn’t even what I called you to talk about,” he mentioned as he scrubbed at his eyes, trying to rid himself of the damp chill.

“No?”

“No, I wanted to explain why I haven’t been attending therapy.” He paused, hearing her shifting on the other end. When she said nothing, he said, “I haven’t been. For a while, really. Maybe I just haven’t found the right therapist yet, but I was just tired. I don’t know, I really thought things were getting better there for a moment, but I was just ignoring everything. Covering it all up.”

“I can’t say I understand your reasons, but I won’t blame you,” she replied.

As his tears began to dry, the sympathy in his mother’s voice finally reaching him, he could picture Schofield’s daughters in their long dresses, ribbons in their hair flying as they danced. They twirled and smiled to him like he was someone worth seeing. Worth the kindness, however misplaced, that he’d been ignoring in his mother all this time.

 _You could talk about it, you know?_ Tom had said once. He hoped that one day, he truly could.

As June continued to bloom around him, Will found himself falling into strange approximations of old habits—habits from Before Tom, B.T. as his brain began to identify it as. He was careful to not think too deeply about his dreams or Blake or Schofield as he moved through the waking world, but he tried not to keep it all locked away too tightly when he was alone. While there was a tiny bit of resentment still, knowing that pressing them into the darkest, most secretive parts of himself was what ruined everything, he tried not to hold cling onto that, tried to accept the role they all played in shaping the current, living Will Schofield.

This was a part of him.

But he also had to accept that this was what drove Tom away—the hiding and the secret itself. Tom had reacted badly, worse than Will could have imagined, and he honestly couldn’t blame him. It was mental, finding his own face buried in the past where it never belonged. It had taken Will years to find some measure of acceptance about it, he couldn’t expect Tom to find that overnight. Or ever, really.

Will took his time, pulling the pieces apart and together as he spent his evenings carefully finding and sorting all of Tom’s things. They might have been left behind, but Will was loath to keep anything of Tom’s that wasn’t explicitly designed for him.

So, he kept the few sketches Tom had gifted him, precious with their scrawled dedications, and carefully packed up the rest. It was honestly heart-breaking to see all of it together like this, it seemed like most of Tom’s worldly possessions had worked their way into Will’s flat. Almost like Tom had been signalling his own desires to stay while Will was distracted by the light of his presence.

It was a penance in a way, forcing him to see all of the ways he hadn’t been fully ready to let Tom into his life, even as Tom had worked very hard to put himself there. Maybe in another life, he’d get a chance to try again. A more honest Will in a kinder world that Tom deserved.

As he carefully folded the last of Tom’s shirts, only the tiniest hint of that soft, warm scent that was uniquely Tom clinging to it, he couldn’t help but send out a silent plea to the universe that maybe this world that he lived in could be that kinder place, that he might be able to salvage something of himself, that Tom might choose to come back to someday. It was a nice dream, if nothing else.

His real dreams were much the same, though: the flares, the screams, the pain, the blood. Blake still hovered in his vision at night, but he was more comforting now than ever, a constant that Will could rely upon. He would always have Blake, would have a sliver of Schofield’s heart beating inside him. They existed together within him, and that had to count for something.

Time seemed to take on a strange quality without Tom, much like the way light always had such a specific quality in the late afternoon—golden and hazy. Some days felt like he had a million hours to find something to do with, others found him surfacing from a blur of thought past midnight. It was fine, though, he was managing. Without the bright spots Tom carried with him, Will found his life levelling out into one solid plane. It wasn’t great, but it was fine.

That was probably how the last few weeks of the school year seemed to arrive out of the blue one morning. The air was already humid as he made his commute, eyes turned from the crowd around him, and the campus was quieted as the students buried themselves in their work.

“I wonder how Tom is doing with finals,” Will commented when Purnima arrived, aiming for just casual enough to prompt her.

She blinked slowly, her face a blank mask of emotion for a split second. “I’m sure he’s…alright,” she said after a long moment. Busying herself with her bag, she shrugged exaggeratedly. “How would I know?”

“Well, you’re friends with his friends. I was just thinking aloud,” Will replied.

Purnima pursed her lips as she thought, then pushed her bag into her locker with a decisive shove. “Okay, I have intel, but I’ll share it _only_ if you’re emotionally ready for it.”

Will could feel his chest constricting, any news of Tom feeling like it weighed far more than it should at this point. But he couldn’t just not ask, not try to help if something was wrong. “Is he actually alright?” Will asked softly.

“It’s kind of hard to tell, really. No one sees him much anymore. I mean, it wasn’t like he was hanging around as much when you two were—” She cut herself off, then began again, “Before. He made time for everyone, he was good about that stuff. But, ever since…you know, he’s kind of ghosted everyone. He’s gone a lot, and when he’s around the flat with everyone, he’s distracted. Everyone thought it would get better after he look a bit of a holiday over the term break, but nothing’s changed. They tried to be understanding at first, but everyone’s getting a bit worried, which is why I know about it.”

Taking a long breath, Will tried to stop his hands from shaking by sheer force of will. He knew that this was his fault, he knew he was to blame.

“He’s still planning on going home to his mum’s place once he’s done with classes, last everyone heard, so maybe he just needs some time with his family, you know?” she added, stepping forward to pat his arm. “Look, I don’t mean to pry, but have you tried talking to him in a while?”

Will startled slightly, surprised by her question. “I kind of figured that he knew that I would be here when he was ready. I promise I haven’t been bothering him. I…I don’t know what I’d do to help him right now, anyway. It’s awful.”

“I know it is,” Purnima sighed. “All I’m saying is that sometimes people need to hear things more than once before they’ll believe it.”

He peered down at her, trying to translate her words into a road map, a path forward. Was that all it would take? Another shot at trying to bridge the gap between where they were and where they ended up? Will tried not to let a sense of hope balloon in his chest, but maybe he’d always be tainted by the impossible dream that one day Tom would look back at him.

It was after 3 in the morning when Will startled awake. He hadn’t been dreaming, there were no lingering sensations of the past slipping between then and now, just the sense of emptiness in the expanse of his bed. All he’d done was roll over. That was it.

He’d been carefully working up the nerve to sleep in his own bed again, weeks on the couch leaving him sore and tired more often than not. But it was awful laying there on his side of the bed with no promises that Tom would ever fill the other side again. Just an empty space, a gaping hole that was proof of how deeply Tom had embedded himself despite Will’s emotional walls. _A no man’s land_ , he thought to himself, chuckling humourlessly at the ceiling overhead.

The world around him was so still, like maybe this was the dream itself.

Blindly, he pulled his mobile from its charger on his bedside stand and opened his contacts. Like a man possessed, he hit the little call button under Tom’s name.

He knew immediately that this was a horrible idea, that he had nothing planned, nothing to offer. And, shit, what if he woke up Tom? The last thing he needed was to be woken before dawn on a week day. As the call rang and rang in his ear, he hoped that Tom was simply sleeping through this, almost dreading the sound of his voice.

It clicked, a pause, then, “Hey, you’ve reached Tom Blake. You know what to do,” Tom’s voicemail recited. The sound of Tom’s voice was like dousing dust from his eyes—painful. So, so painful and such a relief that maybe that was part of the pain now, too.

The voicemail beeped.

Silence.

“Hi,” Will mumbled, feeling like an unwelcomed guest dripping mud in Tom’s metaphorical front hall. He cleared his throat in the hopes that it could clear some of the sleep from his voice. “I hope I didn’t wake you. I don’t even know what made me ring you this late, anyways. Well, except the fact that you’re not here. So.” He cleared his throat again.

“I just want you to know that—”

His breath stuttered. There was a strange, visceral moment where he realized that there was no parallel to draw between this act and Schofield’s memories. No bombs, no flares, no dark water, none of the phantoms of Blake’s laughter or dancing girls or fields of blossom. This was entirely on Will, finally reaching to Tom without anything but himself.

Slowly, the words formed on his tongue. “To know that I know I fucked this whole thing. I hid what I should have given to you, and I have to live with that. It's awful, it _sucks,_ but I’ll never blame you for anything. Not for hating me or leaving or anything. If you never want to talk to me again, I understand. But if you do want to talk about…anything, about the past or my dreams or, I don’t know, the weather or anything, I’ll be ready. Say the word, and I’ll be ready.

“If you ever need me, for any reason at all, I’ll be there, okay? I will be there,” he finished, closing his eyes against the dark and praying that something in him could reach Tom.

And, when he hung up, the world still felt still and hushed, but Will felt like a part of him had broken loose, drifting out to sea. If all he could do for Tom was give him this promise, then that was better than nothing. It was all of him, really, his entire heart bundled and bruised in a voicemail.

That was all he could do.

Will spent the entirety of the last week of July tied up in knots, wondering how Tom was handling the stress of his finals, if he was speaking with his friends, if he missed Will. He tried not to dwell on the last thing all that often, but he couldn’t help himself, laying in the dark, too anxious to sleep easily. The hope that one day there would be a returned call waiting for him grew in the cracks of his ribcage, like a weed growing through the pavement.

He was simply running through the motions, hoping that he would feel better after this week was done, hoping that Purnima would eventually offer up some gossip to put his worries to rest.

Friday had been quiet, the staff running a bit sluggish in the heat, falling prey to the deep fatigue that seemed to permeate every corner of the campus at the end of finals. Will was glad for it on one hand, no pressure to rush through his tasks, no pressure to make much progress on the cleaning of a 15th century Book of Hours he’d been tasked with. But, on the other, his brain kept running itself in frantic circles, waiting for something that he had no idea how to anticipate. Like static in the air, he could feel something approaching.

What that something was he had no idea.

The end of the day came and went, Will taking his time packing up and heading home. There wasn’t much he needed to do, so he tried to ground himself in the world around him, to take in the streets and the sounds of the chattering birds and the press of heat against his face. He still felt worn with fatigue, but it helped ease some of the tension in his chest.

But the rolling edge of metaphorical thunder sounded in his head when he caught sight of his doorway.

Tom.

He was seated on Will’s front stoop, looking rather forlorn as he waited, his bag hugged to his chest. But his face didn’t look particularly sad, just a bit tired, contemplative as he turned his face to watch the sun filter through the buildings lining the opposite side of the street. His hair was getting long, curling over the tops of his ears and over his forehead. He looked so otherworldly in this light—more handsome than even his memories—that Will almost wanted to cry.

Will took slow, measured steps towards him, a part of him worried that this was simply a mirage. Yet, nothing shifted as he approached, Tom looking just as wonderfully whole and _real_ as he had at first sight.

Pulling to a stop, Will searched for the right words to say, for _anything_ to say. Shit, he didn’t even know why Tom was here. What could he possibly want with Will anymore?

“I wasn’t expecting you,” Will said, immediately regretting it.

Tom sat up slightly, turning to look up at Will. His lips parted, but he said nothing, just watching Will for an infinite second. Nodding, Tom stood slowly as if he’d been waiting for Will for however long. Guilt settled over Will for taking his time, for making Tom wait, even unconsciously.

“I’ll put the kettle on if you’d like,” Will mumbled as he held open the door for Tom. This might as well be a dream, he decided, feeling a bit wrongfooted by everything that was happening.

Standing silhouetted in the doorway, Tom nodded again, as if afraid to speak.

Will was grateful to have something to do while he centred himself, grateful to give Tom time to find his bearings in the space again. It felt oddly empty, Tom’s things packed neatly into a box on the sitting room floor, but so full with Tom himself breathing the same air. Even knowing that Tom was here, Will nearly startled when he saw him sitting on the floor in front of the couch table, just like he used to when he was working.

He set Tom’s cup gently on the table before hovering for a moment, eventually just sinking into the floor in front of Tom.

“You packed up my things?” Tom asked. His voice was a bit rough, like he had a cold or hadn’t been speaking much lately. Will couldn’t decide which idea he liked less.

“I just wanted to be ready in case you wanted to take everything and leave.”

Tom’s jaw worked as if he was chewing on the thought, a tick Will had missed intensely. But he had missed every part of Tom, if he was being honest. Across from him, Tom seemed to be quietly working himself up to something, building up his nerve. After a long exhale, Tom dug through his bag, pulled out the thin folder of Will’s research, and placed it on the table between them.

“We need to talk,” Tom said, calm and determined as he finally met Will’s eyes.

“Alright. Would you like me to start?” Will ventured gently.

“I know you’ve probably spent all of this time brooding, thinking of things to say, but I really think that maybe I should go first,” Tom said, tapping his fingers against the folder. Will nodded, hoping that he had any of the answers Tom was looking for. His eyes tracked the movement of Tom’s hands as he flipped open the folder.

Instead of seeing the few photos he’d been able to find, there was a new photo on top: the Blake family.

For a moment, a memory flashed behind his eyes: Blake’s blood marring the image. But this copy was clean, in near pristine condition. Gently, Will turned it towards himself, taking a long moment to look at Blake, at his brother and his mother. “Where did you find this?”

“Essex,” Tom replied. “It’s kind of a long story.”

“I’ve got nothing but time,” Will said as he replaced the photo and wrapped his hand around his cup.

Licking his lips, Tom began, “So. I guess I should start at the beginning. The very beginning. You already know about me and my sister grew up making all these stories. We’d spend hours just drawing and talking about the characters and their adventures. Sarah would always write about these little creatures that lived in the garden, bunnies and gnomes and elves, but what I didn't tell you was that all of mine were about the same person, about all of the adventures we had around the world. He was special.” Tom paused, eyes lowering. “I always called him, ‘Scho.’”

The hollow places inside Will echoed with Blake’s voice, with the nickname he’d given Schofield. Will inhaled sharply, but forced himself not to interrupt.

Tom laughed softly with embarrassment, his eyes turning shyly to the photo still laying between them. “I used to draw him over and over, trying to get him to look just like I pictured him in my head. But nothing was quite right, you know? When I saw you, it was like seeing that image in my head so clearly. That’s what I meant when I said I knew it was you. I just figured that I’d finally found the right face to fit my imagination, and I kept telling myself that your name was a coincidence. That the way you talked and moved and smiled, that everything was just a nice, happy coincidence.

“I nearly convinced myself that’s all it was for a long time. I think that’s why I panicked when I found all this.” He waved his hand over the folder. “It was proof that this wasn’t a coincidence, that _we_ weren’t a coincidence. Suddenly everything I thought was so set and clear was just one big question mark.”

“I should have told you,” Will said.

“Yeah, probably, but I don’t know how I would have taken it then, either.” Tom rotated his own mug, smiling a little when he noticed that Will had given him the green mug he’d always preferred using.

“Tom,” Will breathed. He’d forgotten how much he liked the feel of his name on his tongue, aching to realize how much he’d probably forgotten since Tom left.

“I’m not angry. I wasn’t ever, really, it just felt like…” Tom looked up to the ceiling, leaning back a little. “Like this wasn’t our choice anymore, maybe. Like maybe you were looking at me and seeing the other Blake. Like everything I was feeling wasn’t me, but this big script that we had to follow. Fate always seemed like a trap, you know?”

“I won’t lie to you, that’s an aspect I never really considered,” admitted Will with a rueful smile. “But I’ve spent my entire life trying to keep me and the other Will Schofield separate, so I do understand.”

Tom lowered his eyes to meet Will's, so deep and blue and kind that it felt like true physical pain for Will not to reach out to him. “It must hurt, carrying around all that with you all the time.”

“Yes. But I’m used to it.”

Leaning his elbows on the table, Tom watched Will’s face, curious and soft, and said, “At first, I didn’t want to believe you. About the dreams. Kept telling myself that maybe you were just, I don’t know, projecting, looking for patterns and connections where there weren’t any. But there were all these feelings, and, the more I looked at what’s left of the other Blake, the more I felt like I was forgetting something.”

Will felt as if his blood stilled in his veins, his lungs slowing their motion. It seemed like too much to hope after all they’d been through, for Tom’s connection to the past to finally show itself now.

There was a fleeting look that passed over Tom’s face, pulling at the corners of his lips as he continued, “I needed answers, so I did what you did and started to research. I even went to Essex over the midterm break, because I just had this feeling. It was like I knew right where to look, which paths to take, which people to hunt down.” He slid the photo of the Blake family aside to reveal a photo of two young boys, posed stiffly. Will recognized Tom’s eyes, even on the face of Blake as a child. “I kept finding things right where I knew they’d be. It’s amazing the types of records that people keep,” he said as he set a printout on top of the pile.

The page was filled with little rectangles in long, straight rows, one along the back circled in red pen. It was a regular pattern, nothing fancy or distinctive, but Will knew immediately. A cemetery.

“This is—” Will whispered.

“Where the other Blake is buried, yeah. I cried over that, don’t even know why, really. But everyone else is buried together.” Tom tapped at his mobile, turning it towards Will with a picture filling the screen. Gravestones, weatherworn but with “Blake” still legible across all three. “The rest of his family. I hate that he’s alone out there in France, middle of nowhere.”

“He didn’t die alone, though,” Will said, voice thick. His hand rested over the red circle on the cemetery map, connecting him to Blake buried in France somewhere. “Schofield was with him.”

“Jesus, you’ve seen it, haven’t you? You saw him…go,” Tom whispered, colour draining from his cheeks as he watched Will’s face.

Will took a slow breath. “Yes.”

“I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to get over how fucked up this is.” Running his hand through his hair, Tom glared down at the papers and photos spread across the couch table. “And how fucked up it is that you have to relive everything while all I’m stuck with is a bunch of childhood stories and this,” he said as he tapped the photo of the Blake family. “It doesn’t seem fair.”

“Of course it’s not, but this was the hand we were dealt. Sometimes that’s all there is,” Will sighed, pushing his mug of tepid tea along the tabletop if only to give himself something to focus on besides Tom’s wide eyes.

They both fell silent. There were no answers that Will could give to any of Tom’s questions, just the quiet of their contemplation in the shared space.

He’d missed the sound of Tom’s breathing.

“I miss you,” Tom murmured, as if he’d read Will’s mind. His face was so soft when Will glanced up at him, so tender and sweet. “I missed you the second I walked out the door, but I needed to figure this shit out. I needed to know where everything fit together.”

“I know. I understand.”

“And I wanted to ring you, I wanted to show up here and talk to you so fucking badly about all of this, but it was like the longer I waited, the more distant you seemed somehow. And school’s been such a pain, you know? It was like I didn’t even have time to breathe, let alone process this. And Jesus, I was awful to you when I found this. I just—”

“Tom,” Will interrupted, placing his hand on the table just shy of Tom’s. “I think it’s fair to say that both of us handled everything poorly. There’s not much we can do about it now other than try to be better.”

Shaking his head gently, Tom’s eyes took on the gentle sheen of tears. “But you thought I hated you,” he said, his voice creaking with a type of desperation that Will could feel rattling around his own ribcage. “It’s a bit of a terrifying thing to realize, you know? Even when I was trying to convince myself that you were just making this all up, I never questioned whether I loved you or not. I think maybe I’ve spent my whole life loving you without even realizing.”

Will leaned forward, finally, _finally_ letting his hands reach out for Tom. He rested the tips of his fingers on Tom’s cheeks. “I've spent my life looking for you. For this version of you,” he promised. There were millions of words piled up in his chest, suffocating each other on their way out until all that was left was, “I’ve always loved you, Tom, that won’t change.”

Tom pressed his lips together, clearly trying to keep the tears pooling in his eyes from falling as he smiled. Will felt a little like he was staring into the white ring of the horizon, the sun just breaking, like he was finally seeing life in full colour again.

"Come back to me," Will begged.

“I did. I am,” Tom mumbled, voice shaky with tears and laughter. “I’m sorry it took me so long.”

He’d forgotten how much kissing Tom felt like coming home, felt like he’d found a place to finally get some rest. But there was something new in this, an open kind of hunger on each other’s lips. The weight of the past laid over them both now, the weight of a connection that they would likely never truly understand, but one that had gotten them here.

Will decided that was good enough, smiling against Tom’s lips.

His bed finally felt like it was the right size again, even with Tom laying underneath him instead of beside him. It was better this way, the less space between them, the more Will felt the ice that had grown around him in the past few weeks melting away under Tom’s care.

“It’s probably too soon after everything, but please stay,” Will said, lips catching against the smooth warmth of Tom’s shoulder, drunk on the taste of him. “I know my flat isn’t much, and there’s not exactly loads of space, but I want you here. I want to come home to you. Please stay.”

“Will,” Tom giggled as he ran his fingers through the mess of Will’s hair. “I’ve been moving all of my stuff here for months. You missed, like, half of my things when you packed the place up.”

Sitting up slightly, Will stared into Tom’s face in the soft half-light of his bedroom. “How is it that I keep finding new reasons to love you?”

Tom just laughed.

The humidity broke with August, soft summer rain showers making the world seem a distant blur behind the veil. All Will wanted to do was lay around like a cat, curled into Tom despite the heat, but life was rarely that leisurely.

Instead, Will found himself pressed into a narrow seat on a bus headed for the outskirts of town, Tom watching the world fly by out the window beside him.

Life had a way of settling into itself so quickly that Will almost forgot what had come before, what it used to feel like. But there were always those flashes to remind him, moments painted so clear into his memory that he wondered if he was simply doomed to remember. It seemed fitting, given everything he’d been through.

Where once, his eyes had searched every bus for that elusive something, now, Will took Tom’s hand gently as the bus rolled to a stop, leading him outside. There was a small break in the clouds overhead, thin patches of blue burning brightly.

“Seems like a nice place,” Tom mentioned, smiling around at the trees and grass nearly sparkling with the damp of rain.

“It is.” Will felt oddly like all of his worlds were colliding here, all of the various threads of lives that converged in them happened to converge here, too. And maybe that was because they did. The other Schofield was buried here, tucked into the tiny plot by the church halfway across the village. But that was for tomorrow.

Today was for the living.

Will’s granddad was sitting in the back garden, watching the cheery trees dancing in the breeze. “Glad you made it,” he said, standing slowly as they rounded the house. He clapped Will on the shoulder affectionately before turning to Tom. “It’s nice to meet you, son,” he said, holding out his hand.

There was no surprise on his face, despite the fact that Will knew that he recognized Tom, if only in the way he studied his face so carefully. He’d been the one to set him on this path, the one who had delivered the information Will needed to eventually find some modicum of understanding with the past. But maybe that explained it all. His granddad felt no surprise, because he’d also been waiting for Will to find Tom, for Tom to find Will.

“It’s good to meet you, too,” Tom replied, just as friendly and casual as ever.

Everything seemed so easy here, like things could just slot into place somehow. It was a feeling that Will was beginning to feel in his own flat, the place slowly turning into a home with Tom officially moving in at the end of the month. It made sense, though, knowing that the other Schofield had gathered what was left of his life here, had lived on despite it all in this place.

Now it was Will’s turn to do the same for himself.

He let his granddad lead Tom through the house, pointing out the various knickknacks and photos as they went. Tom was genuinely happy to follow behind, eyes wide and fascinated with each new story—ones that Will could likely recite from memory now himself. The light here was strange, always a bit dim like the end of a long summer’s day, and Will let himself swim in that, lost in the sound of his granddad’s voice overlaying Tom’s.

When Tom sought him out just before supper, Will was standing out under the cherry trees. Their blossoms had long since fallen away to expose the ripening fruit, already glossy and deep red.

“I think these are Dukes,” Tom said, hooking his chin over Will’s shoulder and wrapping his arms around Will’s waist. “There’s an orchard back home that grows them. We used to earn a few quid picking them as kids. Tough work, but we got to take some home. I still think cherries taste like summer.”

“You’ll have to show me,” Will replied. He smiled up at the boughs as he let his hand tangle into Tom’s resting on his stomach.

In his memories, he could see Blake against a field of cherry blossoms, the white flowers harsh against the khaki of his uniform. He seemed so innocent in Schofield’s mind. But it didn’t last, couldn’t last. They both been torn apart by a war that cared very little about what they sacrificed, about what they left behind. It was a cruel memory, really, the last bloom of softness before Blake bled out in Schofield’s arms.

Blake and Schofield didn’t deserve what they had gotten, the pain that Will still carried across the wide stretch of time. But maybe they lived on in some other world, a world where they could rest, where they could leave their pains and sufferings behind.

Will leaned back into Tom’s arms under the glowing greens of summer.

Maybe the two of them could carve out a piece of that for themselves, maybe they could take all of the anguish of the past and make something worthwhile, something worth waiting for. Maybe the kind of world that they’d been looking for was right here in the space between Will and Tom.

As Tom pulled Will a little closer, always a little closer, he hoped that they could make a kinder world for them.

For themselves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If the wonderful people who found me on tumblr have anything to say about it, this is not the last you'll see of this world. I'll do my best, everyone! If you want to join in on prompting me to write, I'm [thenightwindow](https://thenightwindow.tumblr.com/) on there, as well  
> While you're on tumblr, check out this amazing [edit](https://derbesteseemann.tumblr.com/post/191000610945/so-for-once-in-my-life-let-me-get-what-i-want) that derbesteseemann made for this fic. It's so gorgeous!! They're so talented, and I might still be crying over it  
> Lastly, thank you for being here. It was so wonderful to share this story with you all <3


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